absolutwillie

Tag: pedagogy

  • [Teaching] Using ICT vs Integration: What’s the difference?

    You might be looking at the Computer Use (Ed) module, wondering what all the fuss is about. Fear not, I initially wondered about it too!
    To my mind, the affordances of technology had always seemed obvious: Tech allows us to do cooler things than before, duh! (Then again, I remember the 80s, and I’ve always been a bit of a SciFi geek… so there’s that.)
    But it isn’t all as simple as that. Not only can Information and Communication Technology (ICT) be incredibly helpful – it can also be incredibly frustrating, or even scary. This ambiguous potential seems amplified when it comes to the business of teaching and learning. Some teachers/learners love ICTs, while others loathe it. The problem is, however, that we often have to fend for ourselves when it comes to adopting technology for learning and teaching – whether we have a choice in the matter or not. How do we do this, and why?
    Both these questions are important to consider if we are to benefit from ICT in education. “Why” is, in my opinion, the first question we need to consider before we can get to the “How”. I am not going to give you an answer though – as I want you to reflect on this and come up with some suggestions (you’re welcome to use the comments section below).

    Why do you think ICT is/isn’t important in your teaching practice?

    Maybe looking at some of the “How” ideas can help us reverse-engineer the issue:
    One of the more common hiccups I’ve encountered in teaching practice relates to misconceptions about getting technology into the classroom. What exactly does it mean? Aren’t we trying to get technology out of the classroom? Can’t we just teach the way we always have? And that’s the point, really… I’m sure you’ve been in classrooms (or lecture halls) where the facilitators are quite chuffed with themselves for “using technology to teach”, mainly by translating their handouts and notes into a PowerPoint presentation. Some advancement on this approach might be a facilitator using clickers (once) to demonstrate polling. While these instances are indeed examples of using technology in the classroom, they are not exactly shining examples of integration.
    What is the difference between using and integrating technology in our educational practices? The following chart, by Aditi Rao (2013), highlights some important distinctions that might help us think about the matter:
    Source: https://teachbytes.com/2013/03/29/whats-the-difference-between-using-technology-and-technology-integration/

    One way to look at it, is to see using ICT as a perfunctory nod towards innovation in education, while integrating ICT can be seen as a fundamental acknowledgement of the augmentational and developmental potential such innovation might hold for our pedagogies.

    How do you see it?

    FWMK

  • Reblog: Five-Minute Film Festival: Inspirational Teachers (via edutopia)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED TO EDUTOPIA: EDUTOPIA.ORG
    BY KEYANA STEVENS on July 17, 2015

    People have so many different reasons to join the education field — what inspired you to become an educator? Perhaps you feel a desire to give back to the community, or you relish the intellectual challenge, or perhaps the simple reward of seeing a student smile every day is your motivation. But I suspect that for many people, an encounter with an inspiring educator might have been the spark that led to this career path. Read on for more video profiles of inspiring teachers across the country and their stories.

    Video Playlist: Inspirational Teachers

    Watch the player below to see the whole playlist, or view it on YouTube.
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLrMqXQ2J_13vcbHVJTImOO2wmWDDVi0md]
    1. Teacher Chris Emdin Finding Ways to Make Math Fun (3:44)
      Dr. Chris Emdin, a science educator and professor at the Columbia Teachers College, started the #HipHopEd movement to help teachers connect science and math education with students’ real-world interests. This video was originally created as an advertisement for Office Depot, but Emdin’s message of “meeting students on their own cultural turf” will resonate with teachers everywhere.
    2. Shelter from the Storm (3:39)
      Ms. Reifler is a teacher in a low-income elementary school in east Los Angeles. She encourages her students to look beyond their circumstances and envision what a “good life” could mean for them. Like any teacher, Ms. Reifler only has one year to spend with her students, but as the video says, “A moment with a good teacher can give a lifetime of hope.”
    3. David Hunter, Zombie-Based Learning (2:34)
      David Hunter noticed how much his students loved books and movies about the zombie apocalypse, and instead of telling them to read something else, he found a way to add the concept into his curriculum. He uses a self-made graphic textbook to teach students about disease outbreaks and survival skills, incorporating state curriculum standards and project-based learning in creative ways.
    4. Meditation 4 Madmen – Kevin “Teach” Baas (4:53)
      If you saw Kevin Baas riding his motorcycle down the street you might not immediately think “educator,” but the shop class teacher’s passion for helping his students succeed is the same as any other’s. (The second half of this video does get a bit advertorial, so when you get to that point, hit pause and check out the website for Kevin’s Kennedy Chopper Class here.)
    5. Ahoy! Meet Nancy Davis, the Pirate Teacher (4:45)
      When Nancy Davis, an elementary school teacher, had to have eye surgery for cancer, she worried that her students might be put off by the eye patch she had to wear — so she turned it into an opportunity for fun instead, and became the Pirate Teacher!
    6. Wright’s Law: A Unique Teacher Imparts Real Life Lessons (11:58)
      Physics teacher Jeffrey Wright is most well-known to his students for his whimsical science experiments and classroom demonstrations. His drive to be a good teacher and mentor to his students comes in spite of — or perhaps because of — surprising personal challenges. Be warned: you might want to save this one for watching in the privacy of your home, as it will make you cry (happy) tears.

    More Resources on Inspiring Teachers

    For more stories about educators that go above and beyond the call of duty, check out these additional articles!

  • Reblog: Learning is Not a Mechanism (via HybridPedagogy.com)

    ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE Hybrid Pedagogy Digital Journal: hybridpedagogy.com

    BY Jesse Stommel · 
    “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.” ~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
    Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital tools. Rather, digital pedagogy demands that we think critically about our tools, demands that we reflect actively upon our own practice. So, digital pedagogy means not just drinking the Kool-Aid, but putting the Kool-Aid under a microscope. When I lead workshops for teachers interested in developing digital skills, I say right up front that I have little interest in teaching teachers or learners how to use the technologies they’ll use in classrooms for the next three years. I am much more interested in working with teachers and learners to develop the literacies that will help them use and evaluate the educational tools they’ll be using in ten or twenty years. Often, this means knowing when and how to put tools down, as much as it means knowing when and how to take them up.
    Talk of teaching with technology is not altogether (or even close to nearly) new. In 1915, John Dewey wrote in Schools of To-Morrow: “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.” The development and dissemination of educational technology has always had political, as well as practical, ramifications.
    The large-format blackboard was first used in the U.S. in 1801. The vacuum tube-based computer was introduced in 1946. In the 1960s, Seymour Papert began teaching the Logo programming language to children. The first Learning Management System, PLATO (Program Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960. At the invent of each, there was fear, resistance, and the thoughtless slobber of over-enthusiasm. After the introduction of the Radio Lecture in the 1930s, Lloyd Allen Cook warned, “This mechanizes education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom.” This sentence is not all that different from the ones we’ve read about the Massive Open Online Course over the last three years, or about online learning over the last twenty five years. In the 19th Century, Emily Dickinson hinted at the mechanizing of education in her poem, “From all the Jails the Boys and Girls,” where she equates schools with jails but ultimately determines, “That Prison doesn’t keep.”
    Let’s take a specific (and increasingly ubiquitous tool) by way of example. When I first taught online, I encountered the horror that is the gradebook inside most learning management systems, which reduces students (often color coding them) into mere rows in a spreadsheet. Over the last 15 years, I’ve watched this tool proliferate into all the institutions where I’ve worked. Even teachers that don’t use the learning management system for its other decidedly more pleasurable uses have made its gradebook more and more central to the learning experience for students. On its surface, the LMS gradebook does not seem all that fundamentally different from an analog gradebook, which also reduces students to mere rows in a spreadsheet. But most learning management systems now offer (or threaten) to automate a process which is, in fact, deeply idiosyncratic. They make grading more efficient, as though efficiency is something we ought to celebrate in teaching and learning.
    It seems easier to far too many teachers to imagine that students do work the way machines do — that they can be scored according to objective metrics and neatly compared to one another. Schools, and the systems we’ve invented to support them, condition us to believe that there are always others (objective experts or even algorithms) who can know better than us the value of our own work. I’m struck by the number of institutions that for all intents and purposes equate teaching with grading — that assume our job as teachers is to merely separate the wheat from the chaff. And I find myself truly confused when anyone suggests to me that there is a way for us to do this kind of work objectively. For me, teaching and learning have always been (and will always be) deeply subjective.
    bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress about her experience in graduate school, “nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures of defiance aimed at masking inferiority or substandard work” (5). One of the problems with learning management system gradebooks, often mapped to rubrics and outcomes (which have run equally rampant of late), is that they assume students (and their experiences) are interchangeable. And they assume the same of teachers. The problem is that lesson plans and assignments can’t be expected to work exactly the same with every set of students, with every teacher, or on every given day. Both teachers and learners must approach the classroom from a place of flexibility, willing to see the encounters, exchanges, interactions, and relationships that develop in a classroom as dynamic. Grades, and the (very bizarre) notion of their systematized objectivity, stand as an immediate affront to this kind of classroom.
    I recently worked with a student that admitted to stopping doing the work for the current week, because she was distracted by — “lost within,” to use her words — a subject from a previous week. My response was simple and encouraging, “sounds good, stay lost.” There would have been no column sufficient for representing this exchange in a gradebook, and this kind of exchange has been the rule more than the exception in my work as a teacher. The text in question, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is about exactly what the student described to me, going on a quest and getting lost. This is, for me, what learning looks like — not finishing assignments, not following directions, not dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s. It’s a process of discovery that has no outcome fixed in advance. This kind of learning is about sitting (sometimes uncomfortably) with our not knowing. Grading inside a learning management system too often obscures, does not reveal, this process.
    I used these systems for years, struggling to find ways to subvert their worst intentions, until I ultimately determined to simply say, “I would prefer not to.”
    If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of digital pedagogy, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen better to students. And, by “listen,” I decidedly do not mean “surveil.” The former implies an invitation to open dialogue, whereas the latter implies a hierarchical relationship through which learners are made into mere data points. My call, then, is for more emphasis on the tools that help us fully and genuinely inhabit digital environments, tools like ears, eyes, or fingers. My call is to stop attempting to distinguish so incessantly between online and on-ground learning, between the virtual and the face-to-face, between digital pedagogy and chalkboard pedagogy. Good digital pedagogy is just good pedagogy.
    bell hooks writes, in Teaching to Transgress, “The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring” (7). So, I want to end this post with several questions: what kinds of tools can we find, build, or imagine that help make the work of learning “fun,” as hooks advocates? Can we imagine assessment mechanisms even that encourage discovery, ones not designed for assessing learning but designed forlearning through assessment? When do we decide that a tool isn’t working, and how can we work together to set it down en masse?

  • Protected: Weeklikse Vraag 4

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • Protected: Weekly Question 3

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • [Teaching] Starting a Journey of Digital Pedagogy

    “education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world”      — Paulo Freire

    Experimenting with education, live, is one of the scariest, most exciting and crazily exhilarating rides I’ve thrown myself into. Incredibly scary when you consider that I’ve taken just under 200 teaching students into the deep end with me. Wildly exciting when you realise that we are running where others fear to tread – and doing so while looking everywhere at once. Add to that the insane exhilaration of flipping your university classroom for the first time, and you’ve got one heck of a rush.

    This blog forms part of the class experiment. I hope that it will become one of the main supporting structures of our multimodal class…-room space. The collaborative hub of it all, if you will.

    One way to find out!
     Let’s go!