Educating the Dragon: pinelopi

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Wearing two hats

by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

With the beginning of the new school year down under, teachers set their own new goals and many decide to apply some new strategies. For some this might involve using ICT and perhaps trying out blended online approaches that combine both online and face-to-face teaching and learning. In New Zealand and worldwide blended education is a fast developing area that is expected to continue growing, especially in kiwi schools with the rollout of UFB. This is an exciting opportunity to experiment with new tools and approaches, but also to motivate teachers to take one step further and investigate how they and their students experience the whole process, through research. Here are some of the reasons:

Knowing yourself! Through the process of researching your own class you wear two hats – that of the teacher and that of the researcher. This twofold role helps you to continuously self-reflect on what you are doing as a teacher and why you are doing it.

Knowing your students! Similarly to knowing yourself, through research you investigate your context in a more systematic way. You collect and analyse your data from your students, either through interviews, surveys or observations in a thoroughly designed way, preferably informed by the literature and other studies looking into similar topics.

Improving your teaching! While you research your class you collect lots of evidence regarding the success or not of your approaches. It is an ongoing process where, at any stage, you can adapt your practices, change your approaches, use different tools or do anything else that you think might improve your students’ experience.

Sharing your results and your learning journey! Nobody can deny how great the feeling of sharing is. Learning about what other teachers did, how they did it and what the results were is always interesting for educators who want to improve students’ learning experiences. A presentation at your school’s staffroom, a poster at a conference, or even better a published article in a research journal, are a few ways to communicate your class story to inspire others and contribute to the body of knowledge for the improvement of teaching and learning. Even if you think that your results are not that impressive, the learning journey you went through and your growth as a teacher is something that is definitely worth sharing!

Resources:

Photo by Jonathan_W
Educators sharing their stories through the CORE Education community
Educators publishing their research in Computers in New Zealand Schools: Learning, Teaching, Technology
New Zealand Council for Educational Research
Enabling e-Learning - Research and Readings
Riel, M. (2010). Understanding Action Research, Center For Collaborative Action Research. Pepperdine University

Opening your classroom to the world

by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

Many teachers are using blogs in the classroom, exploring their unique potential to engage learners through sharing their work with a real audience. A recent article in the online journal Computers in New Zealand Schools: Learning, Teaching, Technology gives an example of using blogs in a primary classroom from the teacher’s point of view. Gillian May started blogging with her students at the beginning of this school year and through her article she unveils some of the unique advantages that this had for her as a teacher and her students. Some of them include:

· Strengthening home – school connections, by enabling families to have access to student learning.

“Our class blog has changed the way our classroom operates and it has improved the link between home and school beyond our wildest dreams”.

· Enhancing student engagement, by motivating them to share their learning with a real audience.

“It gives the students ownership but more importantly it gives their learning real-life purpose that means something to them.”

Sara Kajder talks about the potential of emerging technologies such as blogs to provide students the opportunity to write for a real audience, share their learning and become active members of online communities (Kajder, 2007). Not many years ago, the web was a place where people could find and retrieve information. Now, the read/write web gives everyone a voice and instead of passively consuming information we can actively create it through online collaboration (Richardson, 2006).

As teachers, we have the responsibility, but also the power to teach students how to effectively and responsibly take advantage of these opportunities that the read/write web offers. Teachers don’t need sophisticated computer knowledge to do that. As Gillian May said

"Prior t o June 2010 I had no experience with blogging. I was introduced to the idea at a professional development session, and decided that I might have a play with setting up my own class blog”.

Trial and error is probably the best way to do it! As we experiment with new tools and as we observe the advantages, especially with student engagement and motivation, but also with parents' involvement in student learning, we get further motivated to continue. Of course, the more we commit to it, the more sensitive we need to become on consequent implication, such as privacy, security and ownership; the web provides many opportunities for professional development about these issues. Lifelong learning - isn't it?

Resources:

Photo by Cathy Cassidy
Kajder, S., B. (2007). Unleashing potential with emerging technologies. In K. Beers, R., E., Probst & L., Rief (Eds.). Adolescent literacy: Turning promose into practice (pp.213-229). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
May G., (2011). A teacher’s experience of using blogs. Computers in New Zealand Schools: Learning, teaching, technology. Vol. 23, No. 2.
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis and podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Chapter 1: The read/write web. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Corwin Press.
Open content licencing for educators: A free online workshop designed for educators who want to learn more about open education resources, copyright, and creative commons licences. 23-27 January, 2012.

Talking about pencils...

by Pinelopi Zaka (pinelopi.zaka@gmail.com, @paz11uc)

A combination of Friday night excitement, passionate change agents, twitter and of course lots of humour: this is #pencilchat. Once again, education tweeps from all over the world united their voices in a twitter chat, but this time they added big doses of irony and sarcasm. The topic is simple and its message is deep: imagine that you living several years ago when pencils were beginning to be introduced at schools. What are the benefits? Most importantly, what are the implications for teaching, learning and schooling in general?

As much simple as this may look like for today’s world, it couldn’t be that simple back in the day... Now, replacing the word pencil with the tools of today’s world, computers, mobile devices and other innovations that still don’t have a natural place in most educational systems, this is how peculiar and funny the whole debate about using ICT in the classroom might look like in the near future.

But this is our aim as change agents after all. We want future generations to enjoy teaching and learning in an environment that is meaningful and relevant to the real world. We want them to find difficulty in understanding why there was so much debate regarding the blend of ICT in teaching and learning, just because the seamless implementation of all these tools will be a natural and undisputable thing to do for them. There will be a time that discussing about educational use of ICT will be as funny and weird as #pencilchat.

You can follow and contribute to #pencilchat anytime. The community is growing with thousands of tweets sent over the last three days! Here are some of my favourites: