The Three Key Trends
1. Collaborative.
If Web 2.0 has taught us
anything, it’s to play nicely together. Sure, there are times for buckling down
and working alone, but in most cases, the collaborative process boosts
everyone’s game. In progressives schools across the country, students and teachers
are learning from each other in all sorts of ways.
Sharing information and connecting with others
— whether we know them personally or not — has proven to be a
powerful tool in education. Students are collaborating with each other
through social media to learn more about specific subjects, to
test out ideas and theories, to learn facts, and to gauge each others’
opinions.
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| Lenny Gonzales |
They’re finding each other on their own kid-specific
social networking sites, on their blogs, on schools’
sites, and of course on Facebook and Twitter. Though
Facebook is still a red herring when it comes to school policy (Massachusetts
districts have threatened to fire teachers who
friend students on Facebook), and educators are split over whether tweeting in
class is disruptive or helpful, the
sites continue to be pervasive in both
higher-ed and K-12. Educators know they can grab students’ attention where they
naturally live outside the classroom — the online social world, whether or not
it’s Facebook.
“If you’re teaching something that’s usually
bland and you insert a simple tool that allows students to connect with each
other or their peers in other schools and countries whenever they want, you
just see kids’ faces light up,” says veteran
educator Chris Lehmann of the Science
Leadership Academy.
Educators Unite
But social networking is not just for teens, as
evidenced by the 500 million-plus Facebook users. Teachers are putting
their collective smarts together to find the best ways of engaging
students, using social media to teach everything from reading
and writing to Shakespeare.
Educators are also using social media to connect with
each other, share ideas, and find the best teaching tools and practices. Sites
like Classroom 2.0, Teacher Tube, PBS
Teachers, Edmodo, Edutopia, and
countless others are lit up with teachers sharing success
stories, asking for advice, and providing support.
Collaboration is happening offline, too, at schools where educators
team-teach and organize professional
learning networks.
Collaboration is also finding its way into curriculum with open-source
sites to which everyone is encouraged to contribute.
Working together is woven into the fabric of project-based schools like the Science
Leadership in Academy, which focuses on science, technology, math
and entrepreneurship, and Napa New Tech High High. The
idea is simple: by working together, students figure out how to find common
ground, balance each others’ skills, communicate clearly, and be accountable to
the team for their part of the project. Just as they would in the work place.
Watch for: (1) Department of Education working to establish a one-stop shop for teacher networks. (2) Commonly accepted guidelines for using YouTube, Facebook, and other social media in schools.
2. Tech-Powered.
Pens and pencils are far
from obsolete, but forward-thinking educators are finding other interactive
tools to grab their students’ attention. School programs are built around teaching
how to create video games. Teachers are using Guitar Hero, geo-caching
(high-tech scavenger hunt), Google maps for teaching literature, Wii in lieu of
P.E., VoiceThread to communicate, ePals and LiveMocha to learn global languages
with native speakers, Voki to create avatars of characters in stories, and Skype
to communicate with peers from all over the world — even augmented reality, connecting
students to virtual characters. And that’s just a tiny sampling.
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| Flickr:Randy Pertiet |
Creating media is another noteworthy
tech-driven initiative in education. Media permeates our lives, and the better
able students are to create and communicate with media, the better connected
they’ll be to global events and to the working world. To that end, programs
like Digital Youth Network focus
on teaching students to create podcasts, videos, and record music; and
Adobe Youth Voices teaches kids how to make and edit films and
connects them to documentary filmmakers.
Tech-savvy teachers are threading media-making
tools into the curriculum with free (or cheap) tools, like
comic strip-creation site ToonDo, Microsoft
Photo Story 3 for slide shows, SoundSlides for
audio slide shows, Microsoft Movie Maker, and VoiceThread to
string together images, videos, and documents, to name just a few.
Students in high school and college are
using digital portfolios — the
equivalent of resumes — to showcase the trajectory of their work on websites
that link to their assignments, achievements, and course of study, using
photos, graphics, spreadsheets and web pages.
Watch for: The explosive growth of high-tech companies and venture capitalists investing ever-more capital in the education market.
3. Blended.
Simply stated, blended learning is combining computers with traditional teaching. Knowing that today’s learners are wired at all times, teachers are directing students’ natural online proclivity towards schoolwork. It’s referred to as different things — reverse teaching, flip teaching, backwards classroom, or reverse instruction. But it all means the same thing: students conduct research, watch videos, participate in collaborative online discussions, and so on at home and at school — both in K-12 schools and in colleges and universities. |
Lenny Gonzalez
Watching videos on iPads
in class with teacher's guidance |
Teachers use this technique in different ways.
Some assign interactive quizzes and
online collaborative projects at home, some use computer
time in class, some assign watching videos and lectures at
home and use class time for hands-on projects, some place most of the
curriculum online and work one-one-one with students in class. However they
choose to do it, the best examples of blended learning programs involve
teachers who use home-time online discussions and collaborative projects as
fuel for content and discussion in the classroom.
This movement is growing quickly — the
Department of Education plans to spend $30 million over the
next three years to bring blended learning to 400 schools around the country.
Watch for: Schools using blended learning to save costs on books and supplements.
What these trends mean
Given the growing momentum of these trends, what does
it mean for students, teachers, schools, and the education community at large?
- Teachers’ and students’ relationships are changing, as they learn from each other.
- Teachers roles are shifting from owners of information to facilitators and guides to learning.
- Educators are finding different ways of using class time.
- Introverted students are finding ways to participate in class discussions online.
- Different approaches to teaching are being used in the same class.
- Students are getting a global perspective.
December 28, 2011
By Tina Barseghian
Mind Shift, http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/12/three-trends-that-define-the-future-of-teaching-and-learning-2/
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