Helping teachers get into blogging has been an enlightening experience so far. Yes, I know we have only had one session so far, but I have spent the greater part of the last seven years trying to find ways to “shift” teacher attitudes about the use of technology.
This post will not be some long polemic about my thoughts, and that is okay as I am trying to make a point. Blogging, while called publishing, need not always be so polished and perfected. One may have a thought or an idea that needs a bit more flushing out, an idea that may need more space than Twitter can provide, and so one can simply crank it out, get it on he web, and see who responds.
Blogging can be a great tool to simply work through your thoughts. First by sitting down and articulating exactly what you are trying to say and secondly through the instant feedback from your readers. So here is what I have been thinking about since Wednesday:
I have been very careful to meet teachers at their starting points. I am very aware that I could, by moving too quickly, push teachers out of their comfort zones and lose their interest. I am noticing that adults treat their learning with care and caution. They question it. They are timid at times and move quiet slowly. As a teacher working with them, I am very aware of their trepidation and try to acquiesce to their fears. This is good practice. This is starting from the learner and moving forward.
My question is how often do we do this with our students? How often do we sit back and think about the comfort levels of the diverse students in our classes. Are we worried that if we move too fast we could lose them, or are we trying to get through curriculum? Are we worried that some students maybe fearful and nervous of what they are being asked to do, or do we simply assume that all are eager learners?
Differentiated instruction has become a buzz word, and like all jargon has lost much of its meaning, but I think it is important to show the same level of care and attention to students that we pay when working with teachers. Furthermore, why is it that some teachers are so cautious when it comes to learning new things? Is this hesitation a characteristic of life long learning? What do you think?
By the way this post took me nine minutes to write.
We held our first Blogging Club for teachers at my school yesterday and I would say that it was a resounding success. Of course I would say that because I am facilitating the group, but seriously it was great to see so many enthusiastic, open-minded teachers eager to learn about something new.
If you are one of the teachers who was there yesterday, and you are reading this post, welcome! Reading blogs is one of the first steps to entering the conversation and moving forward on your journey. In the spirit of reflective learning, I want to use this post and the subsequent ones I write about this process to be a place where I reflect on the process of working with teachers who want to use more technology. I am a firm believer that we learn best, when we can articulate our style, our successes, and most importantly our failures. I also want to use this series of posts to document what we are doing as a means to share the journey with other teachers, at other schools who may be interested in a similar project.
What we did:
In an effort to use as many useful tools as we can, beyond just blogs, I created a Google Doc as a place to take collective notes on our meeting. I am finding that Google Docs are a great tool for constructing meaning by its users. I could have easily passed out or shared the answers to some of the questions we discussed on a hand out or powerpoint, but I feel it is important to have stakeholders gather their thoughts and ideas and collaborate to come up with a shared response.
I created an outline on the document and encouraged participants to take notes as we talked. This was a bit new and unusual for some, and it was natural to want to read what was happening on the document. I think after a while it will get easier.
Here is some of what was there:
Why did you sign up for this blogging project?What are you hoping to get out of it?
A renewed interest in blogging
Have difficulties sometimes trying to figure out what to write about.
never blogged before – want to learn/experiment!
To develop a class blog and perhaps a professional blog
To have a space for discussion points that are generated in class but because of time-constraints we cannot fully develop them.
Community
Communication
who is the audience?
Two words on this list make me very happy: Community and Communication. We are on the right track!
Here was the agenda:
Have a general conversation about why people blog.
Different types of blogs: class, personal, professional.
Different blogging platforms
Start a blog
Talk about design and features
It was great to see how these initial questions raised much bigger and more philosophical questions. I didn’t want to start with such a big scope, but it was encouraging to see the interest. Some of the major raised questions were about:
Time constraints
Safety
Online Identity
Publishing something while your learning (Things not being perfect)
There were other concerns, but these were the few that come to mind. I do not want to address these issues in this post, but rather hope that we can tackle each one in the coming weeks.
I think one mistake I made was that I only used my blogs and general way of doing things as examples, and people may have been a bit shocked by the amount of time I spend on my online presence. I want to ensure teachers who are in our group that I may be a bit of an anomaly. There is no expectation for teachers to have four blogs and spend a few hours a night posting to your blogs. Each individual will find a comfort zone and work from there. So please do not think that we are all trying to race to some kind of blogging ideal. We are here to start where you as an individual teacher feel comfortable and slowly move at your pace till you feel confident to move forward.
Interesting to see how much more cautious and nervous teachers can be about learning than their students. As teachers we tend to be more dubious and want to move very slowly and cautiously while we learn, but then we expect our students to be enthusiastic learners who are always working at the class pace rather than their own. Something to keep in mind: Each learner starts in a different place and needs their own pace. Do we do that in our classrooms, or are we trying to get through curriculum?
Next week we will look at a variety of other blogs to a sense of the diversity in style and content. Here is a list you may want to start exploring before next week:
We went on to discuss the different types of blogs that teachers could have: Class, Personal, and Professional. Based on this Google Doc Survey I sent out prior to the meeting it looks like we will have a variety of different blog styles within our group, which is fantastic.
In closing we spent some time looking at various platforms, mainly: Blogger, WordPress, Weebly, and Edublogs. The expectation is that teachers will have a clear idea of what sort of blog they want to start and which platform will be best for them. Next week, we will create blogs and begin looking, I mean writing about, what we learn.
I am thinking about proposing that no matter what kind of blog teachers create, they also create a reflective blog for the purpose of this club. So they/you too can have a place to write about the various videos we will watch, the posts we will read, and the conversations we will have.
What do you think teachers? How is it going so far? Don’t be shy leave a comment and let the conversations begin. For those of you wondering about time, this post took me 17 minutes to write, 10 minutes to edit. Please do not judge lest there be typos or grammatical faux pas. (Spelling?)
There are hundreds if not thousands of posts online about how teachers use or misuse Facebook. I am not a huge fan of Facebook myself; my personal opinion of the tool have flip- flopped more times than I would like to admit, but I have found it to be an easy way to keep in touch with friends who are not overly connected in other ways and with other tools.
I have recently found it a very cool tool to stay in touch with former students. You see, in the international school circuit, teachers and students lead very transient lives. We come in and out of each there lives very quickly. I have found Facebook to be great tool for not only keeping tabs on former students, but as a place I can continue to teach and learn from them
I am firm believer that we are now at a time and place where learning is happening everywhere, and both students and teachers must take advantage of the connections we make, no matter how fleeting. If I find and teach a student who is a talented writer and enthusiastic blogger in six grade, I want to be able to continue working with her for years to come.If I find students who are compassionate caretakers of the earth and active with social issues, I want them to remain active members of my network.
I guess what I am trying to say is that if we are too scared to connect with student using social media, then we are denying ourselves a crucial segment of our learning networks. I love having former students who I follow on Twitter. They sometimes leave the most insightful comments. Just today I had two great connections with former students through Facebook.
Before I share the stories, let me explain my student Facebook policy. I do not friend any current students on my Facebook profile. I have in the past, however, when moving on from a school, friended a few students who I really trusted and connected with on deeper level. There are only about five of these students with whom I stay in touch. One is now a twenty something year old women who I taught six years ago in The Bronx, and who I visited last time I was in NYC. The others were in 8th grade when I was in Malaysia and recently graduated. One recently sent me this request:
I love the fact that she trusted me enough to ask me for my advice. We have stayed in touch through blogs and Facebook since she was in eighth grade. She is a kind and brilliant young lady. She is a valuable member of my network.
My more current policy, looks like this: I have created a Mr. Raisdana fan page which I share with all students current former etc..This way, tehy cannot see my personal content, and I cannot see theirs. I use this site to share homework, articles, and try to instigate conversations between my current students and the kids I taught last year in Doha. My current kids are still a bit shy and quiet, but my students in Doha have been active staying in touch. Sometimes it is just silly catching up:
But it can also be a great tool to continue teaching kids:
So as you can see, Facebook and social media do not have to be something to be scared about. All social media is about building relationships based on openness and trust. There is no reason why we can’t create and foster long lasting teacher/learner relationships with our students. You are not going to stay in touch with every student you ever teach, but wouldn’t it be great to stay in touch with the ones who really got what you were teaching? To be able to advize, teach, and learn from them as they grow up and become adults. Life long learning, means life long relationships.
I want to thank my students for everything they have taught me and invite them to leave a comment and join the conversation.
I recently sent out a document asking for some editing help on a letter I want to send out to teachers at my school. I am a firm believer that teachers will never use new tools or try new methods of teaching, until they have a firm understanding of the tools and methods on a personal level. In short, if you want a class full of bloggers, you need a blogger to sell it to them. A teacher mandated to “use” technology will never convince a class of students to blog.
To remedy this situation, I have decided to gather five to ten teachers from my school and walk them through the blogging process. From there we will move wherever their interests takes us, but I will guide them toward Twitter and building their own learning networks. I will encourage them to blog about whatever excites them, whether that is pedagogy or knitting. I just want to see teachers modeling good writing practice and taking charge of their digital identities.
Here is where you come in: Blog Alliance! How about you do the same thing? In a few weeks we will join our fledgling bloggers. As they become more comfortable we will help them find a supportive and critical audience. In a few months time, we will hopefully have some new blood in the network as well as a team of teachers ready to move our respective schools forward.
If you are interested please leave a comment with your details. Let me know if I forgot anything or other suggestions. I plan to send this letter (Edit it, use it, share it) out this week. My school is off for a week’s holiday but I would like to start before November.
Credit where credit is due, Clint Hamada coined the term Blog Alliance, but I am pretty sure it is under Creative Commons license. CC another lesson for the Blog Alliance!
Please join us on the wiki to offer any advice or guidance you feel will be useful.
I usually post my reviews of books, music, and film on my personal blog, but the film I watched last night and am about to review seemed a better fit here. For years, I have been actively working with students who are passionate about Global Issues, Social Justice, and student activism. Helping students raise their awareness about the issues we face as a citizens of one shared planet and helping them find ways to effectively spurn action is really the only reason I got into teaching. I am a firm believer that all content and skills no matter the class should have some connection to a better understanding of Global Issues. School should be a place where our curriculum culminates on making life on Earth better for as many people as we can. Forget getting kids ready for college, I want to get them ready to save our lives! We are very to close some pretty scary times, to waste time on anything else would be criminal. We need this generation and every generation after it to be aware, vocal, and active. If I sound panicked, it is because I am.
I was a bit apprehensive about watching The Age of Stupid. Someone had sent me the link on Twitter a while back, and the film has sat on my hard drive since. I’m not sure if it was the title or the lackluster trailer, but something about it made me feel like it wouldn’t be any good. Last night with my wife out of town, I decided to give it a try and man was I pleasantly surprised.
The blurb from IMDB reads:
This ambitious documentary/drama/animation hybrid stars Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the devastated world of the future, asking the question: “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?” He looks back on footage of real people around the world in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.
Amid news reports of the gathering effects of climate change and global civilisation teetering towards destruction, he alights on six stories of individuals whose lives in the early years of the 21st century seem to illustrate aspects of the impending catastrophe. These six stories take the form of interweaving documentary segments that report on the lives of real people in the present, and switch the film’s narrative form from fiction to fact. The people who feature are:
Al Duvernay, a resident of New Orleans who stayed behind and helped in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. He reflects on what it feels like to have had all his possessions washed away in the flood, and also on his job in the oil industry and how valuable resources are being wasted.
Indian businessman Jehangir Wadia, who talks about the start-up of his low cost airline GoAir and his democratic vision of a world in which all people, rich and poor, are able to afford air travel.
Two Iraqi children, Jamila and Adnan, who fled with their family to Jordan during the Iraq War, who tell the story of their father’s death and of their desire to be reunited with the older brother they left behind.
Fernand Pareau, an 82-year-old man who works as a guide on the Mont Blanc glacier in France – he takes an English family on a tour of the glacier and explains how he has seen the ice recede massively in his lifetime. The guide is also shown taking action against expanding road infrastructure in his area.
Wind-farm developer, Piers Guy who talks about his efforts to bring sustainable energy to an English village, and how he is being blocked by people who profess a commitment to fighting global warming but do not want wind turbines destroying their views. His family takes action in reducing their carbon footprint and contemplate the effects of air travel.
Layefa Malemi, a Nigerian woman who struggles with poverty despite the wealth of oil in her country. She talks about her ambition to study medicine and the everyday impact of the exploitation of oil by Shell Nigeria on health, security and the environment in Nigeria.
These glimpses into the lives of a disparate group of people all affected by the oil industry are a perfect backdrop to the main message of the film. Which are: that it highlights the fundamental causes that have brought us to where we are as a species- A species that is rapidly destroying its own habitat. One of the most frustrating factors about working with young people who want to learn about global issues is that we rarely dig deep enough to truly understand the core causes that connect so many issues like climate change, poverty conflict etc…
We work on projects to educate students about recycling and green living, or maybe discuss the state of a world where most people live on a dollar a day, but at the end of the day most students, as least the ones I work with, will return to their world of blind consumerism that has been drilled into them since birth by the ever expanding global free market, because they are never asked to really look at the source of the problems. It is one thing to lead a recycling program at a school or help build schools in Africa, but no sustainable change, not the kind we need to save us from extinction, will come from such surface level actions without true understanding.
We need to help kids look deeply at why the world’s wealth is horded by a small number of its citizens, while so many people suffer. We cannot be afraid to examine concepts like colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. We cannot expect a student to understand why Africa is “always so messed up,” without understanding the rape of the continent by European countries centuries ago. Student can never understand the root causes of terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East without having a basic understanding of imperialism and the implications of fossil fuels on the world’s military powerhouse’s need for it.
One site I recently found that does a great job of helping kids look beyond simple living green platitudes is Dropping Knowledge. Covering a range of ideas from gender equality to animal rights, the site does not shy away from asking questions that most teachers would avoid, and the best part is that student asks the questions themselves. If you really want a deep and robust Global Issues program I suggest you have your students take the time to ponder a few of them.
Back to the film. The Age of Stupid does a great job of getting to the source of many of our problems. White its focus is on the effects of climate change, there are a few animated segments that highlight the concepts I mentioned earlier. Cause of the perfect length and simplicity, I highly recommend you use them with students as discussion starters. This clip highlights how nearly all human conflicts have been a result of human beings’ need for resources, played perfectly over the backdrop of colonialism and imperialism, it subtly segues into the role of oil in current conflicts.
This clip could lead to great discussions about how the world’s imperialistic need for resources and control is not something we simply study in history, but that this lust for goods is the source of our problems today.
The second clip illustrates how our casual attitude toward consumerism stems from the impetus of the same capitalistic motives. The clip does not shy away from putting capitalism in the spotlight and questioning how we are expected to understand a system that is based on infinite growth using finite resources. That very question, alone, could lead to some intense discoveries for young people.
They are told everyday, everywhere they look that there is one system that epitomizes progress, and this system demands that they must consume to be successful. It must be our goal as Global Issues facilitators to not only change how they act by doing futile recycling drives, but how they think about their own roles as consumers and global citizens. We must allow young people to consider alternative economic systems and ways of life. Before I get a rash of comments telling me that Stalin and Mao didn’t work, and the free market system is the best we can do, let me say, “I get it.” I am not championing communism here. I am saying that we must have a completely new system. New ways of thinking. We cannot continue to believe that we will survive within a system that demands progress and growth as if we have infinite resources. We need today’s young people to help us, and they cannot if the do not understand the past and are blinded by the false hype of capitalism. It cannot be considered blasphemy to criticize and examine a system that is in crisis. A system that is literally leading us to extinction. Now is the time.
The Age of Stupid reminds us that we are headed for some dark times. It also points out the terrible suffering endured by many of the planet’s citizens so that we can live in the comfort and ease we have come to expect in the “developed” world. Nothing will change until young people are exposed to the underlying causes of our planet in collapse. This film is a great first step to getting them to think about these causes.
