I spent today (Saturday) at the Texas Writer's Conference which is an annual conference for the local chapter of the National Writers Project. It was a great day of learning. The presentations were good and thought provoking for the most part.
On the way home I was listening to a podcast by Michael Resnick who works with the Life Long Kindergarten project at MIT. He was talking about the great need for creative thinkers in our world and mentioned the growing gap between the skills needed in the workforce and what the types of learners are coming out of schools.
A lightbulb went on because at the conference there was a question about a different kind of gap. The session was on New Literacies. A teacher in the session asked the presenter, who was also a teacher and talking about using blogs, how she could make assignments fair when there were some kids who had a lot of access to technology at home and others who don't. Here was another gap that is growing.
The teacher in the audience seemed to be of the opinion that the best thing to do was to level the playing field for all students and not require use of technology.
What can we educators do to bridge the gaps and keep them from widening?
While exploring Mrs. Perry's classroom blog in response to a comment to my blog I found something REALLY important. This shows how to remove the Blogger toolbar!! Digital Inspiration has some code you can add that will take away that navbar at the top. The fact that students can easily go from their blog to random blogs or search right on the page has made blogger.com an inappropriate tool for student use. Mrs. Perry is doing some interesting things with her Fourth Graders which I encourage you to look at. She has removed her navbar and made it safe in other ways I have yet to explore. Thanks Megan! Everyone interested in educational blogging should check out Megan's Blog Desk. It is awesome!
I am finding myself waking up very early lately. The main reason is that I need to leave for school at 6:30 to get there on time. Actually, I try to get there a bit early since as the tech person the interruptions start right away.
This morning I got up and decided to read a few blogs. Now I need to go and make coffee and I still have not had time to read many or to write about what I am thinking... How do people find time for this?
On this Friday morning I am able to sit, read blogs and even write because I do not have to leave the house at 6:30 am like most days. I have an all day meeting which starts at the sane hour of 8:30, so I can leave just before 8!
I have been ASTOUNDED by my new school. Today is the last day of the second week. Already the fourth grade classes have done a technology project. They used Publisher to create a newspaper page about themselves complete with a digital picture! These teachers are something else! Yesterday I sat in on a few grade level meetings and found out that one of the problems that teachers here have is that they get too many emails from parents before school (one teacher said she had 20 to respond to before school started and they come all day).
In the eMINTS project we tried to remove all of the barriers by providing teachers with enough technology, bandwidth, and training so that they could effectively use technology in the classroom. Right now I am thinking that one barrier we weren't able to remove was a mindset about technology. There were teachers who would not even check their email. I remember one teacher saying that she didn't want parents to have her email address because they might start emailing her.
The teachers there dealt with other barriers also. This school has excellent test scores, supportive parents, good support for teacher professional development, and many professional parents. The kids are ready to do challenging things when they walk in the school door.
One thing I am interested in observing is whether my theory about organic growth of technology use in schools plays out in this school. More to come...
Maybe that last search was a little unfair because it is not what students in school are really doing. So, how about something that REAL kids are doing. This week the 3rd grade in my school was starting to study biomes. How about that? Let's try. From the list at my Public Library I can choose Kid Search. The page looks like this:So, I will choose Geography or should I choose science? With Geography I get 7 results:and then if I filter for Books and Encyclopedias it narrows down to 3:If I choose Science I get 9 results, many of which are the same and when narrowed down by Books or Encyclopedias I get the same three results. If I do a Google Search on Biomes here is what I see: I know that the Google search has 1,250,000 results, but I am just going to use the first page anyway. On the first page I already have The World's Biomes from UC Berkeley, the Biome page from Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Biome page from Enchanted Learning. These are all kid-friendly accurate sources. hmmmm....
The Austin Public Library System starts with a page that looks like this: There are so many databases to choose from it is a bit overwhelming.
I decided to do a medical search for Sarcoidosis, a fairly rare illness that my sister has. It is the type of thing that I might like to find more information about.First I had to figure out how to get to my library page. That took me a few steps.Then I had to figure out where the databases were. That again took some effort.Then I had to choose which of the databases I wanted.Then I had to find my library card and type in the 13 number card number.And finally I came to this page: This is a well organized page and I could easily see that I wanted to use the alphabet to "Find a disease, condition, injury or procedure". From there I found a ton of very helpful information that was well organized into categories like: evidence based reports, encyclopedias, reference books, fact sheets, news, drugs and herbs, and alternative source Then I went to Google and typed in Sarcoidosis. Here are the choices I was given:
It was really easy and it seems to me that the immediate results of this search give me lots of different approaches I could take just like the database search did. Because I am an educated adult I could look at this page and select the reputable sources and get the information I was looking for. Hmmmm....
I just listened to a fantastic podcast called Teachers Teaching Teachers where they were talking about searching with Databases vs. searching with Google or other search engines. http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?cat=145The teachers and media specialists who participated in this discussion were very passionate about the value of using databases.
Joyce Valenza, a teacher-librarian at Springfield Township High School spoke very eloquently about how it was freaking her out that the Ed Tech community was so uninterested in the use of databases and unaware of their value.Here is what Joyce Valenza said about this on her blog:http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334.html
On the way home I was listening to a podcast by Michael Resnick who works with the Life Long Kindergarten project at MIT. He was talking about the great need for creative thinkers in our world and mentioned the growing gap between the skills needed in the workforce and what the types of learners are coming out of schools.
