EduBlog Insights

This past Tuesday I visited the class of a University of Georgia colleague, Gretchen Thomas. She invited me to be a guest speaker on my favorite topic, blogs and education. Several in the class knew about blogs but the definitions were consistently those of it being an online journal only. I love being able to dispel those notiions. It is exciting to be able to share the possibilities that blogs offer us in education. The majority of this bright class were Elementary Ed majors so I took them through The Write Weblog and modeled how you can use your blog to teach and learn from each other and then empower the students with their own blogs to explore their own learning. Each time I get the opportunity to talk about blogs I continue to be amazed at how interactive this process can be as you stand back and see the writers with distinctive voices emerge. There is really nothing like it. We talked about potential, possibilities and the need to truly listen to our students.

Near the end one of the students asked me what I thought the next big thing would be. The question kind of threw me as who knows? I told her that we just needed to be open to the ways that education needed to change and that they needed to be a part of these conversations. I pointed this group to wikis (which none had heard of) as a way to explore other possibilities and collaborate with others who are learning, too.

If any of Gretchen’s. students are reading this I just want to say that there is great value to this collective wisdom that can come from the voices of students and teachers on blogs. Let your voices be heard! We need to share our reflections.

I’ve had WordPress for a while now and it seems Sam is getting all the kinks, transfers, etc. squared away. Sam DeVore has been hard at work getting all of the old manila feed addresses redirected to my blog, among the many other helpful things he continues to do. Thank-you Sam! I am really liking WordPress and look forward to more learning. One thing I love is all the online help that is available! Anyway he warned me that a bunch of people may suddenly get a bunch of info from me so I’m giving you a heads up!

I love this post. I love the title. Giddy-up or Give it up? Lessons from my day with President Carter!

Vicki Davis got to hear Jimmy Carter’s “writing across the ccurriculum message” at Georgia Southwerstern University. Jimmy Carter is one of my heroes. Talk about making a difference with your life - he leads the way! You have to go read her ‘lessons learned’! She really captures the essence of learning. Her observations are profound.
Her blogging keeps getting better and better and she really captures the meaning of the connections we can make to learning. She says “Teachers must say “Giddyup” and not “give up” with their students. She talks of some of her painful observatations as she observed the audience. We’ve alll had them. She doesn’t give up though. That’s what’s important. Listen to her words here:

I also learn from every commenter, every student, and every book! Never before in history, has such a wealth of knowledge from those who know been available. Today, RSS means Relatively Simple access to Sages (well RSaS, but you get my point.)

You can tell Vicki is in for the long haul. She’s not giving up! Our students will rise to our expectations. Let’s not give up. Let’s “giddyup”!

Great post, Vicki! Thanks for sharing. You’re making a difference!

I’m traveling back to Miss Neville’s class in the morning. I was getting ready to post on the class blog and got sidetracked by comments. What blogger can resist reading comments? On the class blog the JHH fifth grade bloggers are welcoming these kids to the world of blogging. It is powerful. What I love is that they are firing away with questions- questions addressed to the group! I always encourage my groups to end up a blog post with a thought provoking question. Encourage the conversations. I saw good questions from this group. Angel asks “Why do you want to blog with your kids and why?” He gets right to the point. Great questions all around from this sharp little group.Once again I was sidetracked as I started reading their posts. I had to make a few comments.

I’ve blogged before about comments. They make such a difference It’s the connector for our students. It also provides so many teachable moments. It provides “thinkable” moments for them. Some of our best classroom discussions emerge from comments. We share together. We talk about ones that make us soar, ones that make us pause and rethink and we just enjoy sharing those delightful morsels of learning that occur. You can construct lessons around them You get a chance to foster higher level thinking on the blogs. They read a comment. Then they may read a comment that comments on the comment. They get lots of short quick practices with writing that is directed to them and therein it is highly relevant. Then they have to construct a combined meaning that comes about from thinking about what has been written to them in response to what they wrote. It’s such a good way to begin the process of teaching reflective thinking. I like to see the progress the students make. They start off with statements such as “I like this blog.” We get to expand their thinking and they begin to take note of the the delight of language and then reasons for writing become more apparent. They have ownership. I have been so fortunate to have crossed paths with so many wonderful people who take the time to comment on my student blogs as well as my own. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. You are the ones making a difference for our emerging writers/bloggers.

One of my goals was to be sure to write a comment a day. Many days I do more. I’m going to keep that goal and try to keep that goal to the forefront.

Students need time to make connections to what they are learning. When we finish teaching a topic, our students need time to think about the pros and cons, discuss the relevance, and make connections to other things in their life. We talk about having them engaged in their learning. Many times doing my teaching I have found that what we are teaching to our students lacks the personal relevance necessary for any meaning. It may be relevant to us as educators and we believe it should be relevant to the students but we have to give them time to talk with others, explore and enjoy the learning. We have to lead them to the relevance. This is why classroom discussions are so important.

I’d like to suggest that conversations on weblogs are ideal to help students discover relevance and make connections to what they are learning. Weblogs can be used to explain what they have learned in their own words. Then students have the opportunity to learn from comments from others. It gives the discussion a much wider circle. Too often our classroom discussions
end up being dominated by the teacher and one or two verbal students.

I started this post the other day and discovered two great posts this morning that relate to this topic. Dean posted My Theory of Relativity. Be sure to read his entire post - good thinking and good conversations always emerge from Dean’s blog. Then Darren responds with Habit of Mind. He talks about how each discipline facilitates a different habit of mind. The value is in the habit of mind that the learning facilitates.

This is an excellent article and ties in with so much of the discussions we have been having lately.

topics we have been discussing lately. 

A couple of selections from the article:

(permission has been granted to post)

First, the abstract:

This

paper explores the issues and challenges associated with the transformative

nature of digital media and devices on teaching and learning. It proposes

that current students may think and process information differently

than their teachers and suggests that we adopt the term digital mind

as a way to explain this phenomenon. It explores the relationship of

societal changes to the learning styles of current students and suggests

possible ways to alter classroom activities to accommodate not just

the inclusion of devices, but the learning styles associated with digital

minds.  

Then these great suggestions

for effective instruction as relates to digital minds:

Brown

following suggestions:

1. Focus on

   Outcomes Rather Than Techniques 

   Provide students with opportunities to put information to work. Allow

   them to do something and not just to know something. Reality based learning,

   learning in context, situated cognition, and problem√based learning

   are strategies that should resonate with digital minds.

2. Provide

   Options for Learning 

   Universal Designs for Learning (O≠Neill, 2001) suggests that students

   will excel with options in learning. Multiple options to express learning,

   multiple representations of content, and multiple ways to engage learners

   will help digital minds in the classroom.

3. Respect

   Parallel Thinking and Multitasking 

   People who grew up with the WWW, mobile phones, MTV and video games

   are used to dealing with many streams of information coming in at one

   time. And while we, as teachers and digital immigrants, may see it as

   disruptive, they really can do more than one thing at a time in class.

4. Highlight

   Key Points 

   New learners are surfers and scanners. While we had limited sources

   for writing papers they essentially have every library in the world

   available to them. They make decisions quickly based on side heads and

   highlighting. We must provide them with cues they recognize and

   help them to slow down and process when needed.

5. Involve

   Learners in Setting Learning Goals 

   Provide them a role in establishing learning goals, building the learning

   community, setting up the rules for the class and in writing the rubrics

   that will be used to judge their performance.

6. Provide

   Active Learning Environments 

   Allow learners to use what ever tools they may need in an assignment.

   Allow them to play to their strengths, be it media production or artistic

   expression in assignments and activities in appropriate ways.

7. Allow Learning

   to be Social 

   We have long recognized the importance of working in groups. It

   builds social skills and provides students with the ability to work

   in the type of environment they will be working in as adults. Working

   in groups means that people will need to talk, discuss and interact,

   activities that are typically discouraged in most classrooms.

8. Provide

   Opportunities for Reflection 

   Lest we think we must only allow people to do things that are fast moving

   and lack depth of processing, we must provide digital minds not only

   with the time to reflect, but the requirement to reflect. A digital

   mind does not mean a better mind necessarily. We should provide opportunities

   for both experiential and reflective cognition.

Good points to keep in mind!  All of them have really got me thinking. I particularly

the authors for letting me share their good work!

Jenn Spiess of TechKNOW pointed out this article, “Reflection in an Always-on Environment: Has It Been Turned OFF?”, by Helen Chen. It comes out of Stanford University. The author states that the learning environment that students reside in is one that is characterized by multitasking, visual orientation, immediate gratification, and parallel processing. This environment may lend itself to students who are left with only their reactions instead of their reflections. The importance of building reflection and critical thinking into the learning process was emphasized. The author points out how it is not just a matter of providing time to reflect, but recognizing that reflection for the purpose of learning is a skill that needs to be taught, possibly through an apprenticeship model. This is where blogs can shine.

I am having some ups

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This is without a doubt the best plans for a workshop on RSS that I’ve seen. What a grand way to begin the week!  Meet my friends in my aggregator

learning.  Dean

aspect and connectivism that veteran bloggers enjoy.

This is a wonderful model!. Thanks for sharing, Dean! His blog, Ideas and thoughts from an EdTech is one of my favorite reads! If his blog is not included in your aggregator, add it now!
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