Beyond School

Notes as We Go 1:1

I’m way too busy under too many hats in this first week prep for students returning in two short days. Apple Education sent two trainers for staff development that took up all afternoon both yesterday and today.

While they did a good job presenting, I found myself wishing that instead of presenting at all, they’d simply uploaded screencast tutorials in how to set up our MacBooks, and how to use iLife, rather than talk about it in front of a slideshow. Instead of listening for four hours (for those of us who did, anyway - many fell out and stopped paying attention), we could have all put in earplugs and used that time to do the things we were implicitly expected to do later.

It’s exactly the problem in so many of our classrooms: instead of giving us time to work through the work at our own pace, taught by digitally prepared lessons - which allows the teachers to monitor, drift, and give individualized help to any who get stuck - the info-presenters stand front and center, set their own pace, and no actual work gets done.

But the Good News is….

I overheard one teacher huddled with a new teacher say, “Yeah, Clay showed me how to do this last year, and it seemed hard, but within 15 minutes it was so easy.” He must have been talking about the wiki collaboration we did last year for the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries.

Then I saw an elementary teacher in a coffee break, and the conversation turned, as I’m sure it does with all of you reputed geeks out there, to computer stuff, and she said: “Are you going to be available to elementary school teachers? I’m horrible at computers, but Lara told me she used wikis or blogs or something last year, and she said it was easy. And Liz and I [Liz left to teach in Venezuela this year] were talking about maybe hooking our classrooms up somehow with computers so we could still teach together…..”

I didn’t say anything about “flat classrooms” or anything else. I just said, “Yeah, give me a holler and we’ll sit together and see what you want to do, and how we might be able to find some ways that computers can add to the effectiveness of your plans.” And she said okay.

Now I Know….

I know that using these tools is one thing, and using them for sound pedagogy is another. But - to hear “it’s easy” twice in two hours, as hearsay from teacherbuzz about seeding done last year, is very encouraging. It’s exactly what I hoped would happen.

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Photo credits:
Top: Dominoes by Amishah on Flickr / Everystockphoto.com
Bottom: uncopyrighted from Everystockphoto.com

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