In response to Alan November

Another task for this week was to read this article on November Learning.   This article deals with a lot of the questions I was asking in my last post.    It also brought up some interesting points I hadn’t heard of yet.  There is definitely a lot of food for thought.  

In the first section of the article they talk about the notion some kids (and adults) that if something is on the Internet then it must be true.  His story of a teen who reads and believes that the holocaust did not happen may be a bit extreme, but it gets the point across.  I think that all teachers should heed November’s advice,  “In every subject there ought to be a standard exercise of presenting students with different versions of the truth and asking them if they know how to discriminate among them because students now have access to more information than everyone in this room can possibly imagine.”

In the second section, November talks about putting webcams in every classroom.  This is an idea that I find to be a little scary.  I don’t think anybody would want a webcam installed in their workspace, and it really seems a bit too Big Brother in 1984 to me.  November makes several good points about sharing classroom activates with parents and family at home.  I think that webcasting special events that parents are invited to attend in person is a good idea.  If the class does regular presentations, then maybe it would be better to record them and send them home on a thumb drive or DVD. 

November also goes on to talk about parents giving feedback to their kids in real time.  “Through the technology the parent can listen and see the kid. With just a standard computer with a built-in microphone, the parent can talk to the kid and can send notes.”  Once again, I think this is good for special occasions at school, but I would be weary of letting it go to far.  I am afraid that this would be a tool that helicopter parents would take too far. 

In his article he talks about requiring every student to take a course online.  I think this is a really good idea for schools that aren’t able to provide higher level classes to their students.  This would give schools the option to group together AP classes and give more kids the opportunity to take them.  Schools could also give kids the option of taking some collage courses online.  I don’t think online courses could take over for 100% of the school experience, but I think it would be useful in rural areas where students have long commutes into school.  Maybe have one day of school as an online day.  Maybe you could even use online classes to have school during weather emergencies where otherwise school would be closed for days.  There are certainly many, many ways to utilize online classes.   

The last comment he made that I’d like to talk about was, “Staff developers, please don’t train teachers to use technology without kids. Ask every teacher to bring two or three students. The trainer trains the students, not the teacher. If you train teachers in technology, they tend to go back and do what they always did -- they will automate.”  I think this is a brilliant concept.  If you show the kids what the teachers have at their disposal they will be asking about it, and probably come up with completely new ways to use the technology. 

I think the bottom line is that technology isn’t going anywhere and teachers need to accept it.   If we can manage to not only accept, but latch on to all of the tools new technology gives us we can give our students a better learning experience.