In Why School? Will Richardson talked about “six unlearning/learning ideas” for educators to support in the “new school”. In this post I am going to talk about how I relate to three of these ideas.
1. Share Everything (or at least something)
It is impossible to be going through the teacher librarianship diploma program without having some experience in ‘sharing’. In my previous classes I have created a wiki, a blog, and a webpages, in addition to posting and sharing through WebCT, and Connect.
I have not, however, transferred this into my ‘real life’ yet. I have not shared my work with my colleagues or sought a wider audience for my work. Why not? in a way I feel more comfortable knowing that no one I know (well) reads it. I think I am, at heart, antisocial (or maybe I mean shy). I am a passive consumer of content and have not really) branched out into being a creator of content. So I am going to start a new blog for myself, outside of coursework, with prominent links to my coursework creations. I will try to use it to organize my own PLN and document my personal professional development.
2. Talk to strangers
I have not yet even attempted to connect my students with the outside world. In fact I wouldn’t even know where to start. Seems scary. I also feel that my district makes it scarier.
3. Do real work for real audiences
This is an area that I find exciting. I think that the potential to engage students by giving them real world problems to investigate and to allow them to create a product that exists for more than to simply be marked by the teacher (and then be recycled) is fascinating. I have always been left with the impression (from our District) that our students should have NO online presence and that all their digital experiences should be safe within the school website SharePoint framework. Any site that had servers in the US was made out to be a boogeyman and as a result I have been somewhat reluctant to explore creating content on the web with my students. This year I experimented with wikis through the SharePoint site provided me by the district. My students in groups created wikis for each of the political parties to coincide with Student Vote. We shared the wiki with the school community by sharing the link to the ‘wiki page library’ with teachers at our school. I was dissatisfied with the experience because there is no way to provide or receive digital feedback with a wiki like that. In addition, using the SharePoint wiki through our ‘virtual classroom’ page meant that only those who can log in to our school webpage could view it. It is not truly ‘real world’. I have discovered my districts digital citizenship pages (which I had no idea existed until yesterday) which contains links to other tools we might use with permission forms that can be sent home to parents. This has given me some ideas to explore.