by Brian Switek (http://xkcd.com)

It was the title that hooked me, but then I had a look at this Discovering Biology blog entry and it reminded me of the ability some people have to frame their teaching in such strange, and yet appealing, ways. Obviously dinosaurs aren’t everyone’s thing (I have two small boys who are really into them) and so this sort of work will appeal to some students more than others. But it got me thinking about how we try and help students learn: today I had a bad day with one of my classes – most of them are what we would class as low ability and I feel that I want to do more to try and help them. I think that being more creative with my lessons is the way to go, but I struggle to do this on a regular basis.  Hurricane Maine’s blog entry encouraged me and gave me some ideas to work with using projects – they are a “social” class and can work together well, if split into smaller groups (I believe it is also called “divide and conquer”?)

The post from Students 2.0 about creativity, I found to be provoking:

“The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box. In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.

If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativity. Unlocking creativity is a scary proposition in and of itself. Who locked it up in the first place?. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.” ”

How much of the education we provide is just expecting students to conform to a very uninspiring teaching method, just for the purpose of having them pass their exams so they can have some sort of options for the next stage of their lives? Just writing about this makes me depressed on their behalf. I would like for them to enjoy learning at school – just as in research (my previous life) there is nothing better than getting the results from an experiment and realising that you have discovered something completely novel, so it would be great if time spent in school could be like this for students – enjoying what they are studying. Part of this, I suspect, demands more creative input into my teaching, and not just plodding through pages and pages of facts that have to be learned.

Dangerously Irrelevant was discussing the merits, or otherwise, of Wikipedia and trying to overcome some teachers’ dislike of this resource. I used to hate it – I hated the fact that anyone could just stick anything on there, and students would think it was solid fact. But in the past few years, it seems to have gotten its act together and, as the article points out, the fact that anyone can add things, or correct them, or discuss them, is one of its great strengths.  It is now usually one of my first port of calls when trying to get to grips with a new subject area.

I’m going on about this because of a Weblogg-ed article in my reader mentioning an online conversation on the Brave New Classroom 2.0 blog forum on whether “the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between?” The blog post was good and encouraged me to read on through a couple of the linked posts.

I could relate to the comments in the Weblogg-ed post about how professional development for teachers has tried to cope with implementing technologies:

“I would argue that Ed2.0 needs to concentrate now on the teachers, not the students, and among the corpus of teachers, focus ONLY on those who want to try to make some change, the “early adapters” if you will. The others, some of them, will follow along in due course or they will not; but the enterprise moves forward on the energy of its best players, not on continued, and boring, Soviet-like efforts to lift everyone at once by dint of big meetings where All Teachers are obligated to come so they can receive some hours of poor teaching practice (being talked at, mostly) in the evident expectation (still!?) that somehow, this experience, the lead, will be transmuted into gold.”

While doing this course and considering how to use it in my lessons I have also been thinking about and observing what other teachers do to develop their teaching skills (for some, not a lot!) and I wonder why this is? Rather unexpectedly, I now find myself classed as an “early adapter” and want to use these methods and try and remove some of the technophobia of others.

A blog post from the Brave New Classroom 2.0 blog entitled “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)” by Michael Wesch (who did one of the (slightly scary) videos from Thing 2) had the challenging remark,

“We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.”

I find it worrying to think that my teaching, because of the limits, constraints and exam grade pressure at school, could get in the way of students learning or their love of learning.

And finally, a thought from another article I moved on to, which listed the educational benefits of Web 2.0, among which was critical thinking:

“The vast amount of data on the Web requires more critical thinking than was needed when I was growing up. In my era of “trusted authorities,” Time Magazine told me most of what I needed to know about the news. There was actually a lot more diversity of opinion on most topics than I was exposed to, which quickly becomes evident when you drill past the first page of a Wikipedia article and look at the discussion and history tabs.”

This appealed to me as I have been thinking about how to minimise students just reading sources (mainly webpages), copying large sections of text from these sources, pasting them together and thinking they have done their project/homework/wiki entry well. I want them to be able to use the project etc as an outlet for their critical thinking skills, which they all have, and seem to apply during every conversation in my class, but then leave at the door when they start their project etc.

I admit I was eventually suckered in by the picture, in the blog’s sidebar, of the Mantyhose – not for me, I think!

I found searching for good blogs difficult and time-consuming: the style of some people’s writing didn’t “fit” with me, and some were too philosophical – I’m looking for practicalities or people who seem to be looking at the same issues that bother me. It was also difficult to pick a blog based on just one or two posts – I suspect choosing blogs will be an ongoing, trial-and-error process.

I ended up searching for Biology or Science blogs as I want to know how relevant web-based technologies can be to my subject and students, and to get an idea of issues others are facing.

However, using the reader, I came across an article from the Education section of the Telegraph newspaper, and it reminded me of a post on a blog that I’d looked at as part of Thing 4. The Telegraph article was about a new “super-school” in the UK, that is currently being built, and how it will be scrapping homework and replacing it with an extra lesson and after-school activities. The new principal states,

”[Homework] is often set simply because there is an expectation it should be set. It does not help with education at all.”

The blog post was entitled, ”Why I Don’t Assign Homework.” and the two things together made me think more about my (and the school’s) rationale about issuing homework.

I completely agree with the blog post that

”The issue for most math teachers, I believe, is one of time management.”

I can’t speak for the maths teachers at our school (who are a fine bunch of people), but I know that I have been guilty of dumping work that we have not covered in class onto students as their homework. And I have also felt guilty imagining the homework I have given them multiplied up by however many other subjects they are taking.

This year I have been giving less homework and trying to make it more targeted to specific topics that students tend to find more difficult. The reason I wouldn’t scrap homework just yet (but just imagine – no more marking homework either!) is that we don’t have enough time, with our timetable and the length of our school year, to cover every topic in the way or to the depth I would like. So homework is often the only way that I can gauge how well a student has understood a concept, or the only way I can get any assessment of their understanding, given the time constraints of our lessons.

Of course, the flaw in my thinking is the assumption that the students have been keeping up with the material covered during lessons and that they have given the homework their full time and attention. This way I see what are the strengths and weaknesses in their understanding and/or expression. If it’s just a five-minute copying of their friend’s work during break, then it’s wasting all of our time.

Powerpoint Reform: a first chapter

• Writing – very well written. Good to see quality doesn’t slip just because the medium changes. I find blog writings to be very opinionated, which is to be expected if it is a means of personal expression
• Reading – shorter articles; broken up into small paragraphs – this style makes it easy to stick to one thought per post and so it makes it easy for the reader to follow your train of thought. Blog articles are good to read in small chunks i.e. you don’t have to set aside a large block of time in order to go through a blog (extremely useful when you have disrputive small kids around at home!)
  How easy would it be to develop a more complex argument in this type of format? This might make the post too long – and, linked to this, how are peoples’ attention spans when reading online compared to sitting down and reading a novel? Just curious.
• Commenting – only a few of the comments add any new ideas or information on the original post. A lot seemed to be the, ”I have the same idea.” or “I did the same thing.” which is probably nice for the original poster, but makes for dull reading. Perhaps a check box along the lines of, ”Please tick this if you found this post helpful.” would save the rest of us reading this type of comments, while still showing the usefulness of the post. Some of the comments, I find myself unable to comment on: ”Bullets are hot! They pretty much rule!” Perhaps it’s some form of intellectual snobbery on my part, but I’m not sure if I want to spend my time trawling through such well thought-out and eloquently stated concepts as this.

Teaching brevity

This post, along with others at Students 2.0, have almost completely convinced me about whether or not a blog is an appropriate medium for the expression of complex and developed ideas. The eloquence and passion of these posts is very impressive and is a level to which I would urge my students to aspire. If blogging and other Web 2.0 tools encourage and give students the confidence to express themselves in this manner then it can only be good.
It has also made me realise that, if I am expecting to set up some sort of blog that students read, the standard of my writing has to be exemplary of the level to which I would want them to reach. However, would this mean that the blog loses some of its conversational nature, which may make students less at ease with it?

It may just be the limited number of blogs and comments that I have been reading, but I get the impression (perhaps mistaken) that the comments tend to be written by people who agree with the original posting and those that differ from the original post’s viewpoint are fewer in number. I’ve discovered over the years that I have, unknowingly, been trained to criticise other people’s ideas and viewpoints: this probably stems from working in research, where part of doing your job is to find fault with others’ results, analyses and conclusions. So I would be a little unnerved to post an opinion on my blog and then find out that no-one who had commented (assuming that there were comments there – if there were none, then that would spark off a whole other set of worries!) had disagreed or pointed out flaws in my thinking. Either what I have posted is the obvious and absolute truth (unlikely!) or readers that disagreed weren’t concerned enough to leave a comment, which doesn’t encourage us to develop, refine or even correct our views.

Ripe environment

As well as finding this a very challenging article, I found the comments on this post to be helpful and add to my understanding of the post’s original ideas. For example, the issue of being able to ”connect more than two dots together” I thought was very important, but I had to ask, ”Where do I get the time to do this, along with everything else I have to do just to keep up with the teaching timetable?” – the comment by Diane Hammond challenged me on this point:

”Is time really the issue? There will never be enough time to accomplish everything you want, and if something is really important to you, you will re-arrange things to make time.”

(I apologise if there is a way of linking you directly to the comment from here, but I haven’t found out that much yet.)

The question raised by Diane Laufenberg about the tension between trying the create a ripe environment while fulfilling government mandates and the demands of a curriculum was well answered by the original poster. This showed me the importance of going back over your blog and interacting further with the people who have commented. I can see how this could help you refine and develop a number of different ideas, from different posts, all at the same time.

The final point in the Thing about ”(How) can blogging facilitate learning?”, is one with which I am still struggling. The blog Rationale for educational blogging made me realise that there is potentially a large benefit to students in helping them mature and develop, in general terms e.g. the third reason on the blog mentions,

”as students explore their own learning and thinking and their distinctive voices emerge.”

Personally, I would love to see a student/s break free from their peer group and from conforming to norms and, instead, to realise that they are an individual with thoughts, opinions and viewpoints that they can express and that deserve to be heard.

The fifth reason also struck a chord with me:

”The worldwide audience provides recognition for students that can be quite profound. Students feel more compelled to write when they believe many others may read and respond. It gives them motivation to excel.”

I would hope that when they realise that any work they do in the form of a blog will be on display to the world, and not just some teacher who has a class full of similar work to mark and only a limited time in which to do so, that students will be motivated to excel and push themselves beyond what they might typically achieve.

The SP-817 Math Blog had some nice ideas of how students could contribute via a blog, but I’m not sure who would get the benefit from this format: do the whole class learn through it, or does the person who puts the blog together benefit, while to the rest of the class it is just another resource to read through?

In terms of ”(How) can blogging facilitate learning?” in my particular subject area (Biology), I’m afraid I’m going to opt out of answering that one for now. It will have to wait until I have had more of a chance to find a bigger sample of educational Biology blogs.