I wanted to get my first version of my inquiry project up, as I’m past the point of impartiality and have no clue if it is thought provoking, or dull. I’m trying to express some of what we explored in this MindMeister.
As you can see, we gathered rather a lot of information that needed to be pared down. Here’s my attempt in doing so…
Please leave me a comment with some feedback if you can. Thank you.
The ecology of the field of education is changing and must change. It must change, or it will become irrelevant. I actually typed I must change at first, perhaps that is very relevant as I must also change or become obsolete.
There is active work by others outside of the system to change the system, reward talents and skills in varying areas, such as chess. This is done through the use of the badge system, a system for which I have a personal fondness as a former Brownie with an impressive selection of badges. However, it does seem like we already do this in some ways. Yes, there are core subjects that must be completed. Outside of that, students choose what they want to do, be it metalwork, ceramics, learn German, play soccer, learn to play piano, ballet, and much more. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as big of a step as we think to move into some form of a badge system.
Education has long history of individualism. Who are the participants, who are the learners? What are their developmental needs? I want to get those who don’t understand why one would use social media, to get an emotional connection, to feel and understand why the connections it corrects are important.
I’m left with a personal drive for connectivity… How can we do it more easily, more efficiently? Social media? That’s what I’m trying to argue. But in this situation, argue isn’t quite the word I want to use. Provoke? Still seems too hostile.
In working on my project today I struggled a bit with the form I chose, while conversely also felt quite comfortable and attached to it. I’m using Haiku Deck for the iPad, which is a simple slide type presentation, yet is very restrictive in the amount of text one can use. I love text. I love to write. I love to write really long things that perhaps people don’t read (ha, leave a comment if you made it this far!). Using Haiku Deck is forcing brevity upon me, forcing me to rely more on visuals. Considering that I’m talking about social media, Twitter in particular, it’s somewhat fitting that I’m forced to be brief.
I want to provoke, and I think I can best do this through limited text. I’ll be posting the first attempt tomorrow, wanting more time on it tonight. I really want to shape it into something that I can set free onto the world.
Today was a bit of a rough one for me. I’ve hit that midcourse hump, the point at which from here on in it’s all downhill, and the momentum can feel a bit much. The information keeps piling on, even as the end seems far too near. As a group, I think we were a bit more reserved than usual, and this was commented on by more than one person. I had a few personal lows – an email stating that at this point human resources will not be looking at filling any more vacancies until the end of August, so as someone on recall and without a position, I’m left in limbo. Having already lost my school permanently, I’ve struggled with shifting my educational thought as I learn so many new things that I’d like to try. Running through my head are thoughts such as, that’d be a great project to do with the grade sevens in the computer lab… oh. The grade eights could use twitter to… oh. That’d be something really interesting to explore as a staff! OH.
The tipping point came during one of the Fame presentations, as apparently we managed to sign up for the same topic, although mine was more specific. I found myself securely in the doldrums, feeling that I had nothing else left, nothing I could do, nothing else worth doing. However, even in that gloomy state of mind, the ideas from my colleagues brought me back.
Cherise really made me think about the importance of our professional communities. I’m going to miss the one that I had, but I need to concentrate on building a new one wherever I may end up. I love learning from and sharing with my peers, it’s been incredibly important for me in my career. I need to look instead at what I can share, and what I can learn. Other schools have no smart boards, no projectors, no wireless connections. How can I teach, and help advocate for those schools? My role may be changing geographically, but that can be an advantage.
Share. Teach. Learn. Grow.
Today I tried to place into words what has merely been running through my head. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that things aren’t quite real until you’ve expressed them to others. I may think in my head that I’d like to run off and join the circus, but until I put voice to that thought, share this idea with others, engage in discussion and debate, it remains a whisper, floating around.
In saying this, I can’t help but apply it to my students. Far too often, their only form of publishing is within the classroom. In some ways, this may not be much better than in their heads. Try as I can to value their work, I am only one voice. They may eventually share the work with their parents, a few friends, although I do wonder at the statistics on doing so.
For my inquiry, I would like to look at using social media as a way to connect students to the world. The world has changed so much since I was a student, with many more avenues for connections, yet many classrooms remain unchanged. Social media being a rather large environment, I think I may end up focusing on Twitter, as previously mentioned.
What I’d really like to do is explore the whys of doing so. Why should I use Twitter with my students. With every how that I encounter or conjure, I’d like to look at a reason for why. Some of these reasons will hopefully be backed by research stating why it is important to engage a student in a particular task. Some of the reasons may be based on BC curriculum. And perhaps there may be a study out there that actually looked at the benefits of social media use for students.
I plan to look at my inquiry through the mindset of creating a presentation for
my peers. Consistently when I attend tech Pro-D within my district, they speak of all the wonderful things that we can do… and how it engages students, and how much they enjoy it. I’d like to create a better WHY. Why are we doing this? What is the benefit? How does it improve the minds of our students? How is it different than traditional methods?
Why do I get the feeling this could be a large research study, not a week and a half project? Eek!
Will Richardson’s Why School? seemed to reach out strongly to readers as evidenced by our in class discussion today. In it, Richardson posits that a new educational model is needed, one that moves away from traditional methods and the focus on testing. He states that “institutional change is everywhere,” and the institution of school is not immune (Richardson, 2012, p. 108).
Over the course of our discussion, we hit on many shared opinions. We agreed that many of the practices that Richardson recommends are already used by teachers, or perhaps more specifically, the effective teachers that we have encountered in our careers. An example of this is inquiry-based learning, something several of us do in our schools. While we agreed that ideas such as inquiry are incredibly important, we struggled with the extreme that Richardson seemed to endorse. We shared his view that there are skills that all students need, ideas that need to be learned, but felt that teacher direction and modelling have a stronger place than what seemed to be indicated (Richardson, p. 283). A group member brought up that perhaps this model was more suited for some subject areas than others, such as Social Studies, and worried about needing sequence such as in Math.
There are rival schools of thought when it comes to what students need in the future. A web search reveals an incredibly interesting article on CNN entitled Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. The article explains that there are schools in the United States taking a different approach to what they feel will be needed, namely an appreciation of “truth, goodness, and beauty” (Duin, 2013). Where the classical approach seems to differ is the belief that “you can’t reflect on something if it’s not in your brain in the first place (Duin, 2013).
I personally found it both interesting and difficult coming from a self-directed high school where I both graduated and taught. Since the opening of the school, the self-directed program has been scaled back year after year, with more constraints and controls put into place. When I attended, I think the school was the best combination of Richardson’s ideal and the reality of a public school with detailed IRPs and PLOs. However, the community struggled with students taking more time to complete work (yet with the highest GPA and exam scores in the district, and high levels of success in university), with students not necessarily being taught what they were familiar with, in the format that they were familiar with, and with the idea that students did not always need to be under direct instruction from a teacher.
In discussion, we came to the conclusion that any change needed both support and time to have a chance at success. A change such as Richardson’s would be difficult within a single classroom or single school, without the support of the larger community, which would include the school district, the public, and the Ministry of Education.
Duin, J. (2013, 06 21). Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. Retrieved from http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2013/
06/21/classical-schools-put-plato-over-ipad/
Richardson, Will. (2012). Why Schools?.
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