IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING
Were talkin' 'bout a revolution
Paul Sibson practises what he preaches.The children in his care share, collaborate, and learn online. He provides open transparency for all while continuing to explore new internet tools for his school.
Every year the children of Fendalton Primary School go on camp. Nothing too unusual about that you may say, it's been happening for years. The children took with them a digital camera and took many photos of the activities they took part in. Again not exactly groundbreaking, I know, but what happened next is unique to the world that our children are growing up in. They put their photos online.
Changing practice
This one, simple act of uploading the photos they took to an online photo sharing site (in this case Picasa) highlights the vast change in the way the internet now works and is viewed by our children. The internet was once, not so long ago, a passive place where users surfed for information created by other people. Sure, lots of people had their own websites, including schools, but these were not places where the user could change or add to the content. Today we are creating as much content on the web as we are consuming. The children at Fendalton are adding their own thoughts, learning and lives onto the web in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago. The internet is a place to share, collaborate and learn in ways that would never have been predicted back when Tim Berners-Lee was first dreaming it up in the late 1980s.
Back to our young photographers. Having uploaded the photos to the school's Picasa account, the sharing was instant. The photos appeared on the large screen in our school office. Then they joined the class slideshow on their blog and they appeared as part of the mosaic of photos on the home page of our newly redesigned school website. It doesn't end with photographs of course. The children also posted reflections about their camp experiences onto their class blog or wiki so that the world (or at least their parents) could read about them and comment on them. Learning can truly move beyond the classroom with these new tools and it is an exciting time to be in education as we all shift our expectations about what is and isn't possible.
As a school, we are exploring and playing with lots of online tools to find out which ones engage our children and community and make a difference. Wikis, blogs and Google Docs are the tools that we have chosen to explore and already we are seeing huge benefits for our teachers and students. Every class in the school is trying out a blog or wiki as their class website and children are busy posting photographs, ideas, thoughts and reflections onto these.
Whole school benefits
It is not just the children who are benefiting from these new tools. They are also starting to make adults' lives easier too. I no longer use Word to produce my documents. Why would I when Google Docs allows me to instantly share documents with others to contribute to? We are starting to use Google Docs to collaborate on team projects, job descriptions, appraisal documents, goal setting and most importantly, planning. These documents can be shared with key staff members so that the documents are genuinely ongoing and reflective. Shared lesson planning gives teachers the opportunity to contribute to a single document that is shared, revised, adapted, evaluated and improved upon to everyone's benefit. It means that the strengths of the whole team can be utilised to reduce workload but also to add more ideas and experience into the mix. The goal is teamwork which is truly working smarter rather than harder; which can lead to greater consistency without removing individuality from the process.
My own goal setting and appraisal documents are shared with my Board of Trustees and the wider community so that they can see as I make changes and add evaluations of ongoing projects. This openness and transparency allows me to have a professional development framework that is not just a start of year/end of year snapshot but a working document that acts as a reflection tool for my own learning. This is only possible because of the 'single document—many contributors' model offered by tools like Google Docs.
Communities of learners
Fendalton School has been working hard for many years now on establishing digital safety expectations within the community and among the children. It is our duty and responsibility as educators to embrace these new technologies and to help our children to make use of them. The world is changing and we need to change with it while helping children to understand risks and make good choices so that they are good net citizens. The tools available online now are too powerful and useful to ignore and the technical barriers to using them are slowly coming down. The learning curve for online content creation is flattening out and our teachers are relishing the challenge of harnessing the power of these tools to truly make a difference to our children.
We are talking about a new way of working but also a new way of thinking. We are witnessing a true revolution as the internet moves from an essentially passive medium to a truly active one, where the user creates content as much as they consume it. The era of using applications offline (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) is coming to an end, and the need to produce paper copies of documents is disappearing every day. Soon all computer applications will be online and shareable so that we can work collaboratively on everything that we do. This is the world that we need to be preparing our children for. At least until the next new thing comes along!
Web references
http://fendalton-principal.blogspot.com/
www.fendalton.school.nz/digitalsafety/
Paul Sibson is
principal of the
Fendalton School
in Fendalton,
Christchurch, New
Zealand. | SUBSCRIBE to EQ | EQ Winter 2008 © Curriculum Corporation | top |
