Learning Conversations

There are some wonderful creative examples of ICT use in UK Education at Stephen Heppell’s Be Very Afraid site . Common themes seem to be authentic, project-based learning, audience, ownership and media literacy. I also noticed that almost every student interviewed had developed great interest & a sense of value of the specific topics discussed  (in History, Science, Music etc.). For example, these Year 5 students developed a real interest in Vikings and their place in their local history. Like this writing class, their project involved an initial excursion to develop ‘real-world’ links. The use of mobile phones to capture media as part of the interesting Year 8 and 9 multiculturalism project at Lampton HS also emphasised ‘authenticity’, involving ‘life like’ tasks which require decision making and exposure to real world information, and also allow students to generate their own problems to solve (CTGV, 1990).  Other projects, such as the ‘100 faces in 100 places’ project, followed a more participatory model of authenticity (Radinsky et al., 1998), involving real community members and activities that potentially become an integral part of the community.

CTGV (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt) (1990). Technology and the design of generative learning environments. Educational Technology, 31(5), 34-40.

Radinsky, J. et al (1998). A framework for authenticity: Mutual benefits partnerships. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.

Image above made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence. Photo avaliable here

I recently attended a presentation from French teacher, Bernard Garcin. He has been running a collaborative project with 30 schools around the world. They use online technologies to support their students’ language learning. They started with email but have slowly graduated to more sophisticated web-based tools. The students are given projects to do, covering a range of themes. For example, two groups were asked to compare and contrast their countries’ energy consumption levels; another group was asked to describe a tour around their home city. All students must write in a foreign language in their correspondence (ie. they are not allowed to use their native language!) One interesting technique he talked about was the use of ‘online pools / surveys’ to initiate interest and spark debate amongst students. On a practical level, Bernard said that because of time zones, theyneed a min. of 4 schools to make the projects work and approx. 10 was an ideal number of participant schools.
Footnote: A number of similar collaborative projects with a creative and language arts theme can be found here.

Made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Available here.

Just explored this commentary about educational YouTube videos … according to the blogger, there is ‘intelligent life on YouTube’! It seems that not a day goes past without hearing this type of hype about the Internet in 2008 … especially in relation to the quite exciting range of media freely accessible to teachers and students. Whether it’s the latest instructional video site, online video rental sites or YouTube collections, this hype seems easy to promote ‘web 1.0′ mindset of educational technology; a traditional ‘one way’, information delivery view of learning. In the case of video, this would involve the notion of learners passively viewing instructional videos. This is valuable of course but in my opinion, they ‘miss the mark’ in terms of the ability of web 2.0 technologies to support ‘learners as publishers’ and media creators. (Even on TeacherTube, there is only one channel devoted to student-generatated products!) Hence, it was refreshing to read Emma’s recent posting about the real affordances of Web 2.0 for children’s learning. She cites Freedman’s publication on Web 2.0 in Education (see paper in the Social Software folder in our Literature section), which contains many convincing and creative ‘case stories’ of teachers allowing their children to be creative with these new tools.

Image Source: http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/db/web2/

I noticed Louise talking about kids as mentors for teachers … there is an interesting project called GenYes in the US where “students learn to provide high-quality, curriculum-focused professional development support for teachers in their classrooms school wide.” Worth a look.