With all of this talk about educational technology and flipped learning, parents, administration, and teachers alike are asking, “Is all of this screen time making our kids smarter?” In his latest book Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson (available here at AMAZON) give us educators much support in our pursuit of increasing student learning with technology.
Mindfulness
As students now have access to so much technology it is important to remember the need to teach them how to use technology for learning. Teachers have to teach students how to be mindful. Clive Thompson defines “mindfulness” as “paying attention to your own attention.” I think we all struggle with how much screen time is too much and when to say when. As EdTechTeacher instructor, Greg Kulowiec, often recommends (and I’m paraphrasing here), “If the iPad is making a task more difficult, then put it away,” Clive confirms that,
“One of the greatest challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is knowing when not to use the, when to rely on the powers of older and slower technologies, like paper and books.”
It is important as we blend or flip learning, that we don’t try to reinvent the wheel. With the addition of iPads into my classroom, I was aware that students knew how to consume content. My challenge was to teach them how to use the iPads for learning and to be mindful throughout the process.
Video as the New Literacy
Once I received a grant for a classroom set of iPads (25), I was most excited about students creating. Sure my students watched my flipped video lessons online, but I wanted them create their own. I frequently challenged students to do video labs, a sort of DIY production in the physics lab. Clive states,
“Another key area of video literacy is our growing ability to capture ideas that are difficult to represent in text . . . That’s because complex physical skills are often incredibly hard to describe in words.”
You’re telling me! After 19 years of teaching, I found students struggled with lab reports. Sure they could write introductions, make graphs, but the analysis of data and drawing conclusions was the tough part (and worse yet, the waste of time it was to see cut and paste procedures). In a video students can show how they collected data. They can then annotate graphs and discuss what their significance is. Clive states, “The difference is, while we’re taught in school how to write and read, our traditional literacy focuses less on these new modes of publishing. We’re working them out on our own for now and discovering just how powerful they can be.” With this new literacy I can both see and hear my students talking about physics, something a traditional lab report could not do.
Writing for the Masses
People are writing now more than ever (on Twitter, blogs, message boards, etc.). What most people neglect to see is that all of this writing as Clive says, “(is) almost always done for an audience.” When you think that someone else may read your writing, you pay more attention to detail, back up your arguments with proof, etc. Clive notes, “Social scientists call this the ‘audience effect’ — the shift in our performance when we know people are watching.”
When I began my first venture into Genius Hour this past Spring, I wanted a way for students to write about their progress. For most students it was their first time creating blogs. I commented frequently to give them additional ideas, but it was when I required they comment on each other’s blogs that I really saw the power of blogging. I further reached out to my PLN and tweeted the links to my students’ blog and many of them were excited to see comments from across the country and views from around the world. It was during the blogging process where I saw students write more meaningfully and thoughtfully about their learning.
The Case for Collaboration
Every day we see people online collaborating. From fan fiction to gaming it is possible to collaborate on anything. Mass collaboration wasn't possible before the internet (imagine the difficulty of coordinating and creating an inventory of information by phone calls and file cabinets!). However, in order for an online group to be successful Smarter Than You Think states,
“The members can’t have too much contact with one another. To work best, the members of a collective group ought to be able to think and work independently. Too much contact risks - blocking, social dampening. Thus “virtual groups” are best, especially for introverts.”
“Learning how to collaborate — particularly on a meaningful real life project, not just a piece of schoolwork — is a crucial skill. In real life, people rarely learn and solve problems in isolation. They do it together.” Clive Thompson
This quote challenges me as an educator to get my students not only to collaborate with those in the classroom, but outside the classroom. It also reminds me the importance of collaboration for students who do not often have a voice in the traditional classroom. With technology I have the opportunity to have students in one class collaborate with students in another class on a lab, project, or maybe even something bigger . . .
To Code or Not to Code
If you would have told me 20 years ago that I would be teaching the same content the same way, I would’ve said you were crazy! Unfortunately it is the truth. Clive observes, “The classroom hasn't changed much over the years.” Sure many of us have access to computers, but they have typically been used to do the same tasks (word processing, making graphs, etc.). Smarter Than You Think states, “But truly clever teachers go one step further: They teach their students programming itself — how to write code.” as a “way of learning about learning.” As teachers we can't just simply replace the pencil with an iPad. We need to challenge students to think logically.
Before I read this chapter in the book, a few tweets had caught my eye regarding coding. I went to the links and then found a great Livebinders page on Coding. This book was reading my mind! I hope to introduce coding into my physics classes next year and further stimulate students’ abstract thinking and problem solving abilities.
Ambient Awareness
How do our students say in touch with each other? You might say texting which is partially true, but the main medium is Twitter. Twitter is a place where students can follow hundreds of others in the school and be aware of the goings on day in and day out. It is this new found “ambient awareness” (as Clive calls it) that has changed society.
Anyone that knows me is aware that I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Yes, I have 4 Twitter accounts (#confession). I have a professional Twitter that I connect with all of you on, but I also have a Twitter specifically for my students to follow me on. As teachers we now have the ability to be in touch with students outside of the classroom 24/7 as I choose. Yes, students still email me with questions, but newer more familiar means to students exist (Edmodo, Twitter, etc.). With this new literacy teachers can now hold "ambient office hours" as Amy Burvall illustrated during the Building Learning Communities conference last week.
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| for more educational artistic inspiration please follow @amyburvall |
Where Do We Go From Here
Internet searches as “semantic” memory, facts. Now as people we can decide what not to remember as these facts become easily looked up. “If we know a digital tool is going to remember a fact, we’re slightly less likely to remember it ourselves” — think cell phone numbers. But can this decreased memory hurt us? Back in the day even Socrates grappled with a similar problem as Clive comments,
“ . . . I talked about how Socrates feared that writing would kill off the Greek tradition of debate and dialectic. But he also worried it would destroy our factual knowledge. This sort of memory was regarded as a “key cognitive skill for the elites. … But what Socrates didn't foresee was the types of complex thought that would be possible once you no longer needed to mentally store everything you’d encountered.”
In the classroom is no longer good enough to ask students questions that are Googleable. Since we are shifting from measuring intelligence by one’s ability to solve problems to the ability to design problems. As I teacher I am challenged to teach students not how to answer questions, but to how to ask better questions. Clive summarizes, “How should you respond when you get powerful new tools for finding answers? Think of harder questions.”
In conclusion I wish to thank the member of my PLN who tweeted about this book a few months back. I am sorry I cannot remember who shared this read. As evidenced in the book — in a time where collecting and saving information is easy, it still remains a challenge to search and find things. I’ll take that as my excuse!
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