Sometimes you get to attend a surprise Edcamp. I was settling in to write when I saw a tweet about Edcamp Los Altos. I checked the map, and it was 2 miles away. Never mind the fact that I was in cycling shoes and a very casual t-shirt, I rode to me school, picked up Wokka and we were off to camp.
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| At Edcamp LosAltos |
As the first session wrapped up, I was in the MPR and I started talking to John Miller. It didn't take long before the conversation was not about tech at all. We talked about supporting community engagement and the challenges and opportunities of implementing a truly progressive pedagogy.
This was just what I needed, and focused on the challenges I chip away at everyday. While it can be tough to keep up with the tech end of things, the change I want to make in these classrooms is to transform the foundational pedagogy.
When we look at using a new tool in class it is an invitation to innovate. In education innovation is not just about workflow or product. Since the early days of my teaching sitting in awesome national writing project workshops, I have heard about the power of the student centered classroom and the need for student choice and voice. From where I sit today I can see that many of my attempts to implement choice were well-intentioned failures.
I had writing assignments with menus instead of prompts, but all of the kids were reading the same text and writing some form of an analysis. It was better than having all of my 9th graders responding to the same prompt, but I was leaving so much money on the table.
In a truly student choice based class, how often would all of the students choose to read the same text?
My challenge, now working in elementary school as a push-in tech teacher, how can I develop and model the possibilities of choice based learning for the teachers I work with? My ideas so far:
- Develop a range of skills and activities that can become learning centers, teach towards portable and transferable skills.
- Use centers or stations in tech class.
- Have students share their learning from centers to drive and/or the class blog to model data collection and assessment.
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