Belief – on reflection

A video showing the answers to the exceptionally powerful question Do you believe in me? I found the video on Wes Fryer’s blog after I saw it mentioned on Twitter.

This is a simple but beautifully produced video, posted to YouTube and created for the Starkville (Mississippi) School District by Broadcast Media Group. It shows some ordinary people, teachers and students, at their best. The schools in the US are starting their educational year and what a powerful and inspirational resource this could be to encourage everyone involved with schools. It encourages everyone to set  high standards and strive for their best.

The video participants aware asked to answer some big (but basic) questions:

• What do you want to be when you grow up?
• Why are you a teacher?
• Who is your favorite teacher? What is your favorite subject? Why?
• What do you want (from your teacher/school/education)?

When you ask “big” questions, and make sure the person answering the question understands that you are listening to their answer, you are often surprised to find that you get “big” answers. Young people are often very honest and the information can be so powerful. If you listen to the answers and then try to act upon them, the results are often very effective, personally and educationally. At the moment I am trying to encourage our students to write their goals for the second half of our school year. Many are not comfortable with reflecting on their journey so far and trot out fairly stock standard answers to get it over and done with. It is not until you sit down with them one-to-one that you can get them to take it on board and really tease out their thoughts.

I would love to see this concept of reflection applied to the general curriculum, in subjects/lessons, on a regular basis. Students and teachers should be encouraged to review what has gone on in their classes, if not daily , then on a weekly basis. We need to give ourselves some time to “catch our breath” and think about the important/good/challenging things, to celebrate the successes and consider how to work on the less successful. This will then help us to move forward in a positive way. As this video show us, the result of reflection can be inspiring.

Learning and technology in schools

Many schools are still banning tools and limiting options by heavy filtering. Once a decision is made, how do you get it changed?

Today I was part of a technology committee discussion about the role of the committee, how it fits into the structure of the school and how it should proceed in the future.  There was discussion about the big picture versus the day-to-day procedures. I, of course, mentioned that schools are (should be!) about student learning and that we (the technology committee) need to be discussing how we can offer  advice on how our school can best use the technologies to improve/aid student learning. We should be leading discussion about the innovations and the ideas of the visionaries and forming opinions on what our school needs based on this. We occasionally need to ask the “what if…” rather than “what we can…due to budget, organizational factors, possible legal issues”.  It is not that the practical should be ignored but that should not be the starting point.

Filtering for instance is a bugbear of mine and I have discussed schools filtering before and why it is limiting to the learning going on in schools, as well as having a good rant about our own government trialling a filter to protect us all.

We need to be creating interesting, creative stimulating learning environments and the technologies are offering us more varied and powerful options to help us do this, not banning various technologies because someone might use them inappropriately. In fact we can be fairly sure that someone will fail the appropriateness test (they always do) but as always the majority will try to do the right thing, when they understand the appropriate procedures. We should always know how to deal with the few and follow up when they make their mistakes

We need to be helping our students to learn how to learn, that learning is not a passive thing but involves many different dynamics. Our students need to be capable of the higher order thinking, to think and make decisions for themselves. They must learn to ask questions and not become pawns for others to manipulate or victims of the dominant. They will have to develop opinions, be able to debate the merit of their beliefs and form ideas based on the best possible facts/information available to them. Our students need to learn to do this now, whilst they are here in our schools. We need to help them understand the wider world and all its tools, not put up impenetrable walls and pretend that “it will all go away in time”. We should not be hoping that, if it doesn’t, someone else will explain it all or that they will be able to work it all out for themselves. We also need to encourage our student to see that valuable learning can happen in many places and at all sorts of unexpected times and they need to value learning. Many students are learning many valuable and interesting things outside the school/classroom walls but they don’t see it as learning. They have been encourged to see it as somehow divorced from school or that it is less valued and therefore it is not shared in classroom discussions, etc, only with other students. The learning in the classrooms is mush less rich and inclusive due to this.

The old adage, “Nothing changes“, is not right because it does but the initial attitude to change, in all eras, seems to be the same/similar.

Students review Ipod Touch and IPhone devices

Joy’s Flatclassroom 2008 project video is a  great video that interviews students who use itouch and the iphone devices. Asks what they think about them and the things they can do with these tools. If your students have itouches and iphones at school they are probably doing things you may not want. Should schools ban them or work on appropriate use and behaviour. A Flat classroom project.
Find more videos like this on Flat Classroom Project