With apologies to Charles Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was an opportunity to use technology to expand thinking, it was a requirement to store technology in pockets, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. So goes the story of young people as they travel from classroom to classroom throughout the school day.
Principle 7: Modern Schools use technology as an amplifier for learning, creating, connecting, communicating, and problem solving.
One of the more puzzling observations I have made in our district, one in which we are one-to-one with chromebooks in grades 2-12, is the mounting of cell phone holders on some classrooms walls. If you don’t know what I am talking about, see the picture at the left. Someone came up with the idea to take a shoe holder for your closet (pictured on the right), put numbers on it, and then market it to schools as a good idea. Students enter the classroom, take out their cell phone, and place it in the presumably assigned pocket number so that the cell phone does not become a distraction during class. Before anyone gets too worked up about this observation, one way or the other, I am NOT saying that valuable learning isn’t taking place in classrooms with these cell phone holders. I am just saying that schools are sending a mixed message to young people concerning the value of technology in the age of information if these pocketed cellphone holders co-exist with one-to-one technology. If this is a familiar dilemma in your district,two questions you might ask are:
How are young people and adults using technology to learn?
To what extent are personal devices controlled by the user?
“In the modern, globally connected work and life environment, everyone is expected to have skills that allow them to both consume and create content for the Web and that show an ability to connect, collaborate, and problem solve” (Richardson & Dixon, 2017, p.14). This is a big part of the reason that schools have spent public funds to provide young people access to the internet via one-to-one devices. However, these devices should not only be used as electronic versions of chalkboards, notebooks, or filmstrips. They instead should provide opportunities for young people in schools to think and learn differently than in past school environments. In other words we need to help young people to take advantage of all the information that is now available to them. Today learning in schools should be less about accumulating information and more about learning to use information. We could get lost with all the different ways chromebooks can be used to help young people to learn how to learn, so instead I wanted to share three ways in which we are using technology to help young people think, create, and problem solve differently in Aurora.
The first is the use of Bee Bots in our kindergarten classrooms. These little guys allow our kindergarteners to collaborate and problem solve how to “program” the bee to travel through a series of steps that they can determine or that is given to them as a challenge. The Bee Bots basically provide the opportunity to allow for learning and discovery involving programmatic thinking through play. That is to say young people learning socially with no direct instruction. I’ve seen these guys in action and it is amazing some of the conversations, thinking, and application through collaborating that are taking place between these 5 to 6 year olds. A second use of technology that promotes thinking and is completely controlled by young people is the use of Dash Robots in our second grade classrooms. This technology allows the second graders (and eventually first graders once our pilot is done) to think programmatically through scratch coding. The second graders have loved the challenge of getting the robots to do various tasks and again the conversations and thinking are impressive. Finally, the third way of promoting thinking, collaborating, and problem solving is being used in the 5th grade with the goal of expanding to 3rd and 4th for the second semester. This group of young people are using Turing Tumble to promote programmatic thinking using this more mechanical versus electrical set-up. These young people are learning to think logically, visualize what moves will need to be made, collaborate to determine what parts need to be placed where, and basically develop their ability to problem solve. Each of these activities are great examples of what can be done in all classrooms, but they do come across as more of an add on than a daily use of technology. The reason why I bring them up is all three demonstrate how we can use technology to help young people create, collaborate, and problem solve. These same skills can be applied everyday in the classroom with some forethought on how to use chromebooks in a similar manner. The key is to use technology to promote the process over producing a product. If we can use this as our guiding factor for the use of technology in each of our classrooms there will be a clear message to young people on the value of using technology to promote learning in the Information Age.
References
Richardson, Will & Dixon, Bruce (2017). 10 Principles for Schools of Modern
Learning. White Paper from modernlearners.com.
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