In Praise of Skype

Note: for those finding this blog from @zbpipe's tweet, the hilarity she refers to is the video below. Enjoy!

Collaboration is king in Web...let’s see, is it 2.0 or 3.0 at this point?

If I have to ask, it likely means we’re at 4.0 by now.

Regardless, lets talk Skype. With it, teachers can utilize live video feeds to accomplish things that past classrooms would have dismissed as fancy. With the increasing prevalence of SMART boards and laptops in classes, there are few excuses why this technology can’t be contributing to any properly equipped classroom in Ontario today.   

Video conferencing is preeminently flexible across all grades and subjects. Students in Kindergarten to University all have something to gain from discussion with people abroad. Even more exciting is its potential across all curriculum subjects. Some examples:
In social studies, students can take a personalized tour of a historic or geographic site that the school would never be able to afford to physically send them to.
In French, students can connect with a classroom in Quebec for a shared language lesson.
In Language, students will expand their media literacy component by differentiating between things they see on a screen (passive vs. interactive information).
In health and physical education, students can interview doctors or compete with another class remotely.
In all these examples, the students have eliminated the passive absorption of information in return for collaborative exchange. Furthermore, because the technology is designed to mimic face to face communication, students will have little to no difficulty understanding its proper use. As with all the finest new educational technologies, in their excitement students are likely to forget they are even learning.

So please, enough talk, let’s Skype.

P.S. The following is a tutorial video I created for the EdTech Cohort entitled "Skype and Education with Dinosaurs." Enjoy.

Into the Present

I’ve been positively giddy since the beginning of this program to discuss the integration of technology into education, because I believe wholeheartedly that it is the future of our profession. Yet the thing about the future is, it’s just so easy to write about. The future is unbridled possibility, and my goodness what a great theme for a blog that is. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that in the past week I’ve found myself avoiding writing about a very real and very present event, my first few days in school placement.

The reason? Well, frankly, teaching is scary.

No wait, that doesn’t quite cover it. Teaching is also messy, and seems at times surgically designed to publicly expose your insecurities. It’s mildly ludicrous, as it means being figuratively locked in a room with a potential group of gleefully hostile children. Teaching is grueling, like having the lead role in a play that runs eight hours a day five days a week. Oh, and you’re also the writer, director and usher to an audience clambering over themselves to escape to the bathroom.

And I’ve always known this, I’ve been in schools long before this year after all, but it’s so much more real now. No longer a volunteer, only briefly a teacher candidate, then: Shawn McCarty, Teacher.

It has a nice ring to it.

Teaching is scary, but It is also exactly what I wish to be doing with my life. Scary, but rewarding on a level I’ve never encountered. It’s fun, frequently hilarious, and constantly educational. My two days in placement taught me more about myself then the entire last year of my life, because I’m open to learning from these grade 8s. Though my associate teacher has much to teach me, those 8s are the ones I’ll be looking to for my best lessons, and they’re not disappointing me.

Back to school, and the future, tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Portal and Prejudice

In our rush to embrace technology in schools there has been a sticking point that has given me some logistical difficulty, and that’s been the integration of Gaming in the classroom. I haven’t been outright dismissive of the idea, simply wary, and until this point mildly perplexed as to why. I believe I’m still associating gaming with locking myself alone in Mom’s basement after school and spending hours playing Sonic the Hedgehog. Despite the nearly two decades since, and a massively increased sophistication and social revolution in gaming, I still only see that little blue hedgehog running blindly across a screen...perhaps to a pharmacy to pick up a Ritalin prescription.

But that’s such an obsolete view of what gaming can mean to a classroom, and I’m beginning to grasp this. Fortunately this is not a new revelation to my colleague, Zack Blashkiw, and you can read his insightful thoughts on the matter here. Zack is right to point out that gaming communities are consistently at the forefront of new avenues for online socialization, and in turn that socialization is key to integrating a relevant teaching program to today’s youth. Far from the rudimentary number and language “games” filling the tech classes of yore, modern games (particularly those implementing level-building) encourage spatial reasoning, resource management, social collaboration, higher logic, etc. In the time it took me to write those examples the list probably grew half a page.

It occurs to me now that my prejudice towards gaming was based on the belief that games were based solely on fun, and so in turn their educational usefulness must be minimal. How silly that was, to assume that kids have to feel or even know that they’re being taught in order to learn something.

This evening I spent some time observing my nephew, turning four this October, and marveled at the way he uses his mother’s laptop. It’s intuitive, cautious and delicate, qualities immediately abandoned in literally every other aspect of his daily life. His is the generation I will be beginning my teaching career with, and in many ways they’re going to be lightyears ahead of us. Yet If his teachers keep an open mind, just imagine how much fun it could be.

Special thanks to @crutherford for supplying the video inspiring these musings. Please give it a look.

Subject Incidental

Reading the newspaper this morning (alas, my dirty secret in the TechEd program; I pick up a dead tree before anything with a screen) I was particularly struck by an article entitled “Unschooled children are their own teachers”.While I’ll resist venturing here into a debate of curriculum-centric vs. student-directed learning (worthwhile though it may be), I was alarmed at the language used in describing the public school system. Some select quotes,

“Being bored makes school miserable for a lot of kids, plus there is the element of compulsion, which completely changes any activity.”

“Holt...argued that mainstream schools stymie the learning process by fostering fear and forcing children to study things they have no interest in.”

“He called progressive schools soft jails and public schools hard jails.”

In contrast, “unschooling”, which is obviously presented favourably in the context of this article, means “looking at life ‘as a creative adventure,’ a co-operative lifestyle involving the entire family.”

So here we are presented with an obvious dichotomy, one in which children are forcibly compelled to study a subject regardless of their personal interest, and the other a vaguely utopian learning democracy.

Fortunately, I’ve still got enough historian in me to consider “dichotomy” a dirty word.

There’s a saying in fiction that there are no bad characters, simply bad writers. I feel we can safely extend this logic to school subjects. Yes, children in public schools are compelled to study certain subjects at certain times, this is inescapable in the current system. Yet assuming for a one moment that this is developmentally destructive for a child, the alternative manifests its positive changes by establishing a creative, co-operative learning environment. However, I fail to see how these qualities cannot be integrated into a public school class, providing it is being run by a teacher open to some creative technological experimentation. With new advances, the way information is conveyed, absorbed and redistributed among classmates is subject to some crucial revisions. Class-controlled social media, easy access to limitless online knowledge, clickers, and a willingness to accept multi/mixed media projects far outside the standard pencil and paper definitions all contribute to a student’s sense of creative inclusion in a class. In turn, it is the teacher’s responsibility to foster and join this co-operation, learning from the technical knowledge of students (and I assume we’ll always be playing catch-up in that regard). With a basis of mutual learning and respect, the specific subject becomes almost incidental, just part of the larger creative adventure. And hardly boring.

So while the aforementioned unschooling article is correct in marveling at the avenues for self-teaching that online technology might afford, I am bewildered at the suggestion that a traditional classroom must be discarded in order to make use of these tools. Self-teaching is a fantastic use of new technology, but how much stronger might it be within a collective of self-teachers, sharing their mutual advances. At the head of such a class is a teacher aiming to be taught.

Sink or Social

I've always considered myself a Technologically inclined chap. I keenly follow new advancements and will slot whole days into my schedule to figure out a new gadget to its maximum potential. So joining a teaching course based on 21st Century technological integration in the classroom was a no brainer.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I had a minor meltdown this past Saturday morning over simultaneously setting up a twitter and blogger account. It's vital to add here that my grandmother has a twitter account.

It wasn't to do with any difficulty in the process itself that caused my frustration, rather it was the daunting concept of linking my online presence to the rest of you. Over thirty people are going to be linked to me at all times from now on, and that's even not including any keen observers looking in on this little EdTech experiment of ours.

At this point I had a revelation that, until now, my link to technology has been entirely antisocial. All my gadgets and surfing and even facebooking has revolved around me either passively absorbing information, or inputting it into a tight-nit easily controlled online setting. I have never integrated myself into a project of many people (strangers, really, though only for a short while) working collectively towards a goal larger than themselves. The fact of that now amazes me, because that is what 21st technology is all about. And with that realization, I find I've been incorrectly viewing new technology as an end in itself, and not the means with which I can make a contribution in "real life." Touch screens, smartboards and live feeds are tremendous advancements, but they're usefulness goes so much deeper then simple fodder for gadget hounds like myself. As a teacher, I am going to have to get very used to linking my life collectively with groups, and that is the first and easily the most important lesson this cohort has given me thus far.

So I share this lesson with all of you, though to some it will surely be old hat. We have to do this together folks, it's sink or social.