Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Curriculum

Recently I was part of a meeting with teachers who were developing units based on the Understanding by Design model. This group of teachers had a range of experiences, from beginner to veteran. Up until this particular meeting, I had not been involved in curriculum development or unit design. I strongly believe that I should be involved in these processes, so I was happy to be at the meeting. I went in not really knowing what to expect, so I initially just observed what these teachers were doing.

Here is what I noted: (1) The work they were doing and the processes that they were following were really reinforcing a didactic approach to teaching. All of the talk going on was centered around the teacher being the expert in the classroom, feeding knowledge (and understanding, so they thought) to students. (2) This unit design seemed to be aimed at what I will call an ‘idiot’ teacher - one who is lacking in the knowledge of their content area. These units were being written so specifically that anyone could read the document and know exactly what to do - what activities to arrange and what materials to use. My question was this - Are teachers really that limited to need this sort of step-by-step guide to teach? The responses I got were something like, “Well, we’re just doing this because we have to.” “Nobody will ever look at this.” “Nobody really knows where we are going with this.” ...and on and on.

The unit design following the Understanding by Design model is not a bad thing in and of itself. What was the problem here? The fact that the underlying definition of learning was the same old, same old. No wonder these teachers saw this as just more of the same, only packaged a little differently. Nobody was being stretched to rethink their ideas of learning and use this unit design process as an opportunity to slowly retool themselves for a change in classroom practice. Shall I put it more bluntly? Nobody was there challenging, in a productive way, their mental models of effective instruction.

I do think there are an overwhelming number of teachers who view their role as the sage-on-the-stage. Too many classrooms are passive, lacking in creativity and are content driven, not student centered. And technology is typically forced into these less-than-effective models. This certainly wasn’t a forum to get any discussion going on using technology in a fundamentally different learning environment. So my contribution for the day was to focus on digital content: video streaming resources and interactive web resources that could be used in the various unit designs that they were developing.

How do we make the change, especially in this type of environment? I think I have some ideas....more to come.

Posted by Randy on 01/19 at 05:02 PM
Professional Development • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Shared Vision

In some earlier posts I laid out ideas regarding a vision for technology and learning. One of the things that crossed my mind while doing this was the idea of it being a shared vision. The reason why I got thinking on this is that in the process, I felt as if I was alone on an island with nobody around to give me input into this big task. As a district, how do we define learning? What specifically do we believe? What do we believe is the role of technology? And why am I the one that is taking a stab at these questions?

Not that I am unwilling to come up with some possible answers, but I think it is important that such basic philosophical decisions be grounded in some sort of group consensus or discussion. A few posts down, I wrote about some of my thought on vision. How mainstream are these ideas? These are things that I believe in, but how much do others in the system believe it? I can’t say that I really know. And it would seem that buy-in by all stakeholders is important

So my advice is this: when you have to answer such essential questions as What is effective learning? and What role does technology play in the educational process? don’t go solo—find some collaborators.

Posted by Randy on 01/18 at 10:17 PM
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Monday, January 17, 2005

Web Note

I’ve been looking around for information concerning blogging in education. One of the exciting things (and sometimes potentially distracting and time consuming) about searching the web is that you can run across the most interesting things. While surfing I found this tool called Web Note.

This is the exact page that I ran across. It’s called Will’s Notes and it looks like a mess when you first go to it. The page presumably contains notes by this person named Will on blogging. You can click on the notes, move them around and resize them, even change colors.

The main Web Note site does offer some hints on how to navigate and keep notes on one of these pages. Some that I thought were interesting: (1) You can embed links and images into notes. (2) You can save your page of notes. There is also a circular button at the top that will allow you to cycle through various saved versions. The page that you create cannot be password protected, so anyone can save and delete notes. (3) To navigate through a lot of notes, press ‘N’ to cycle to the next note and move it to the top. ‘P’ will cycle to the previous note and move it to the top.

You can create your own web note workspace and experiment with this pretty nifty tool.

So where did this come from? If you remove part of the address and go back to the main domain you learn that this was created by a software developer, on his own, who happens to work for Google. This is one of the neat things about the Internet - you never know quite what you will run across. And who knows where this will end up. According to his site, this has become a popular tool. And he thought he was just messing around....

Posted by Randy on 01/17 at 11:38 AM
Web • Emerging Technologies • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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