Eight sixth grade teachers were asked to comment on how their classroom community has changed (or been disrupted) in recent years as a result of new opportunities to use technology in their classrooms. You will hear a central theme of how google docs have transformed how they teach. Listen carefully to the discussion about the advantages these tools have provided as well as (a few) disadvantages that they have had to address. In general, classrooms have become more fluid, allowing for more collaboration on a daily basis. Additionally, the flexibility of working both inside and outside the classroom/school allows for more innovative ways for students to interact with new content as well as being able to work on projects anytime, anywhere. And of course, we have connected their thoughts to the Wenger reading for this week.
DANIEL JOSEPH MENDENHALL says
I definitely agree that technology brings good and bad consequences to the classroom. On one hand, a whole world of information is at the fingertips of today’s students, on the other hand, with reputable sources of information, there is an even greater amount of poor sources for them to choose from. Today’s students will definitely need to be critical analyzers of the sites that they use as resources. The presence of sites that can be distractions or could contain content that is not appropriate for school use is also of concern. A great deal of effort is put forth to block sites and monitor student use of computers. I worked in a school where wikipedia and youtube was blocked for the students. I thought that this was ludicrous, but thinking about the job of the IT guy, where do you cross the line on what students can and cannot gain access to? These are also questions that we will need to wrestle with in schools.
It was nice to see the different perspectives of the teachers in the video. I especially liked the comment about kids liking rice crispie treats, but there use in the classroom may not be appropriate. We do have to be critical on whether technology will be a benefit or distraction when it comes to our lessons.
DANIEL JOSEPH MENDENHALL says
krispie **
JULIE FREAR SCHAPPE says
First-person accounts provide an interesting view into technology in action in the school. As I was listening to the testimonials, I’m wondering about two points from Wenger. First, to what extent are the students involved in the design of learning? Wenger discusses the importance of communities of practice designing processes. The teachers used language that retained control of the processes and decisions. Other than peer review with writing (which is more of a community response to institutional guidelines), are the students a participating community involved in the design?
Second, to what extent to you see Wenger’s peripheral participation playing out in the school context? K-12 schools have a typical history of specifying forms of acceptable participation – frequently based on perceptions of mastery levels, curricular standards, or PSSA benchmarks. To what extent do you think varying participatory identities are accepted or facilitated?
On a side note, I’d be interested to here more about the iPad apps they use. Also do you think that technology has ‘disrupted’ the ways they think about learning, or does technology use function as a new tool perpetuating what Lankshear and Knobel referred to as Mindset 1 (new clothes, same ways)? I think that using technology to do what we have always done more efficiently (an adjective from one of the video interviews) is a common application. Do we innovate or respond to innovations to open emergent learning?
Phil Tietjen says
Great video. You’ve got a nice array of teacher voices here. One part that I find particularly interesting is the teacher who mentions the dilemma of the students’ expectation that he always be available online to answer questions (i.e. no matter what time of day or night). Given that there is a certain percentage of many student questions fall into predictable categories (e.g., when is the assignment due? how long does it have to be? which questions do we have to answer?), it seems like this is an ideal opportunity to think about how more community-centered designs might play a role. For example, instead, of email, what about having a Yammer-like feed where the more basic and logicstical questions could be answered by other students and therefore free up the teacher from feeling the need to be connected all the time.