Tag Archives: Learning

What About You Dad?

I know this blog has traditionally been used to document my teaching, but starting tonight I want to also use it to document my learning. Tonight, for the better part of the night I learned how to create an animated .gif. After seeing several great examples on DS106 blog, I was intrigued by the haunting quality of this medium to see if I could do create one myself. So I did, what I do when I want to learn something new- I played and pushed the buttons and didn’t stop till I had at least a first step.

I am not sure if I did it right, and my final product is still rough and needs nuances and lots of work, but I think I now understand the basics. Here is what I did. Please let me know where I went down a wrong path or if there is an easier way to do this any of this:

I downloaded a clip from The Breakfast Club
I shortened it down to about 3 seconds on iMovie
I uploaded it to this site called Gifninja
I opened the new animated .gif in Preview and moved half the clips to Photoshop
I used about nine of them to create my first ever animated Gif! (Tutorial on youtube)

There are a lot of things wrong with it like the pixelated tiny size. It is moving too fast with too many frames, and not so haunting, but it is a first step. Now that I know what it takes to actually create one, I can focus on finding nuance and the right scene to play more careful attention to. Next time, I will work bigger and slower. Really looking at the piece as a photograoh that barely moves, not just a slowed down film clip. I am also interested in create a animated .gif of images I take myself. Lot’s to think about.

It feels good to start the night never having done a certain thing, and end the night having created something you never thought you could. This is the nature of learning online. Everything is possible if you dedicated the time and attention it needs to learn.

Irrelevance is the Distraction

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Really? Am I writing this post, my third one in a week, (News Alert Humans Like to Socialize and Shackled By Fear) about how computers and the Internet are ruining our children’s lives? More importantly are you reading it? Are we not past this topic yet? News flash! The use of technology, whatever that nebulous term even means, is changing the world and nowhere is this shift more apparent than in our schools. Why? Because most schools are based on antiquated models of what learning used to look like. We can bemoan the fact that students no longer want to sit dopey eyed in rows and hear us ramble on and on about whatever we feel is the most important thing in the world, but really wouldn’t it be better if we started to learn how to bridge our two worlds?

We’ve all heard it before; I am not saying anything new, which begs the question why am I writing this post? Why are you reading? Why can’t we seem to move forward? Why do we need a six-page New York Times article telling us that teenagers are distracted and Facebooking instead of reading novels?

My main gripe and perhaps the impetus of my new crusade is that I refuse to be polarized by the Ed-tech evangelists and the paranoid chalk and talk dinosaurs. I refuse to be forced to make a choice between the book and the computer, between the organic and the digital, between a walk in the woods and a flight through second life, between “real” and virtual life. I refuse to believe that there is only one way to reach young people today. I want to be able to reach them on their level by helping them understand identity creation and digital footprints, but I also want to reach them on their level by taking trips into nature where we write poetry about what we see. There is a middle ground between kids watching Brain Pop videos and creating Power Point videos no one will ever see and calling it integrated technology, and doing worksheets; it is called teaching. It is not the technology that is distracting kids, it is the irrelevance of what we are teaching them and our inability to make it meaningful. You can teach under a tree with a piece of chalk if the kids are buying what you are selling. How do you do that, you may ask? Well that is the million-dollar question isn’t it? I am still learning. That’s the beauty of teaching.

This latest article epitomizes this polarity. Offering examples of exasperated teachers who can’t get their students to read a book versus the cool guy teacher, who is teaching them how to use Pro-Tools, doesn’t help our understanding. We simply cannot make students, teachers, and parents choose between being connected and “tech savvy” and “Old School.” There has to be a middle ground. Where are the stories about teachers who have infused technology to make it ubiquitous like air, (Love that Chris Lehmann quote) so that students can use their talents and newly found knowledge to change the world? Where are the stories about teachers who with passion and love of literature have convinced seventh graders that the pages in a novel can be just as excited or more so that a Facebook feed. I mean really, do we have such little faith in literature that we think a text message is competing with John Steinbeck? If you believe in what you teach and you make it relevant for your students there is nothing they won’t stop doing to follow where you lead.

It is still possible to connect to students without bells and whistles and show them the beauty of well-written prose or the magic of science. I am tired of both sides thinking that students will only learn and stay engaged if the teacher offers a technological carrot. I can no longer, with a straight face say, “It is about the learning and not the tools.” I cannot say that teachers need to create and build meaningful relationships with their students based on trust and honesty if they want them to read on their own.

I could go on and on, but you have heard it all before, and unfortunately most people who will read this post already agree with me, so maybe this connected technology is not as great as it appears. Besides, I have a movie to start editing and I am feeling a bit distracted after reading a six-page article. Maybe, if I can get my work done in time I can actually curl up with a good book. It is really a collection of online columns. Does that count?

Who You Callin’ A Life Long Learner?

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Is reading and acquiring knowledge really learning? That is what most adult do, so where is the creation, the higher-level thinking, the application?

That’s question I got out of bed to jot down last night, and it’s the question I hope this post begins to explore. Let me be the first to admit that I have not really thought this one out, and I hope that by the simple act of wrestling with the words I can pin down some direction to take with further. Feel free to read along, comment, and move forward with me.

There is nothing more deadening to education than the jargonization of ideas. And let’s face it learning ,seeing as it is at the core of what we do, has taken the most abuse. At my last school, we joked about looking for learning. Teachers would snigger in meetings where administrators would say with straight faces, “So what do you think learning looks like?” I get it. It is hard to define.

The term that seems to be perennially in vogue is the life long learner. We want to foster life long learning. We have teachers who are life long learners. Really? I guess I want to explore the idea that we aren’t and that we don’t.

It may look good on a brochure to say that a school’s staff is constantly immersed in learning, but the truth is most people are simply living their lives and trying to get by. Even those of us who champion the cause and bare the flag of the life long learner may simply be deluding ourselves. Are you feeling defensive yet? Good let’s get started!

I always start with Wikipedia, so let’s take a look:

Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines.

Okay, two words jump out and blip on my Bloom’s Taxonomy radar: Acquire and Synthesize. Is the amount of time we spend, acquiring new knowledge and skills, and the amount of subsequent knowledge and skills acquired in proportion to how we synthesize it? In short, what are most people doing with the raw data that pours into our readers and twitter feeds on a daily basis? How far up Bloom’s Taxonomy do most teachers take their learning? Is writing a blog post or creating a wiki enough evidence that you have learned anything? Or is it simply documentation of the data you have reattained?

I have been wracking my brain to think about the last thing I learned. The last time, I acquired new knowledge or skills, which I then applied and used to create something new. I can’t think of anything.

What’s the point you may ask? Well I want to learn something new, and I want a few of you to join me. I say I love learning, but have a hard time identifying anything I have learned in the last year. Maybe I am being hard on myself, but I would hope that if I had learned something it would have at least been exciting enough to register in my memory. No, I don’t want to read websites, or blogs and recreate the ideas in my own terms. I want to, “build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.” How do I do that? You are all teachers. Teach me something new?

If we are all life long learners then we need to be asking ourselves these questions. What is the last thing you learned? I am not looking for a set of data you memorized, or facts you are storing in your brain, I want to see proof. What did you create? Where is your evaluation? If you truly learned something you should have documented, created and evaluated your learning. Right? Share with me. We are all life long learners right? Show me. Teach me.

School Should Not Be Considered Work

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Last night wmchamberlain sent out a link to an exemplar student blog about learning. I agree with Wilt that commenting on student writing is an important practice for teachers who preach the powers of blogging, and I was about to comment on the post, when I stopped myself and felt the need to hash out my ideas out on my bog first, tone them down a bit, and then perhaps, send off the filtered version for this young writer.

I know her intentions are in the right place, but reading her points, I felt that she was missing the entire point of her “school” experience. She is not alone. Many students, teachers, and parents are still caught up in the “success/ achievement” model of school. I wanted to shed some light on other possible models.

I will write as if I am commenting on her blog, but I did not publish these thoughts there for fear of confusing her. I will allow her teacher to share these ides should he so wish.

I Promise to be a better learner by starting to dedicate more of my free time to school-related things.

What are these school related things? Are they subjects? Are they ideas? Do you like them? Do they excite you? Are you curious? Will forcing yourself to spend more of your precious free time on math exercises making you a better learner? How about you spend more of your school time on free time related things. Search for what interests you at school and do it on your own. Ask questions. Explore. Are you interested in art, dance, science? How can you use your time away from the classroom to further learn about these topics? Learning can and should be done all the time. Do not separate free time and school time. Try to learn about what interests you all the time.

By doing so, I could get a better chance of actually fully understanding what they’re teaching me at school than by not making any use of what I’m being taught if I don’t really understand the material.

Don’t worry so much about material but focus on ideas. Your school is not trying to teach you material, but help you find out how to learn about what you love.

I Promise to be a better learner by having a more one on one relationship with my teachers. This way, when I have a question over my school work or need some help, I could have the confidence to ask one of my teachers for help instead of being afraid, and not ask at all, which could cause me to not understand what I’m learning and probably fail in that class.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Make use of your teachers. Let them help you. You should never be afraid to ask questions. That is what teachers want. We live off of questions.

I Promise to be a better learner by taking school a little more seriously. Using this strategy, I could have a way better chance of being successful in the future than by wasting my free time messing around an not caring that much over school, knowing I could give a little more effort in my school work for a better future.

Here is a suggestion: Let’s not think about the future and how school will help you down the road. Let’s think about right now. Your life! Will taking school more seriously help you right now? If not? Why not? How can we make a plan to have what you learn in school be important to your daily life now? That way you have no choice but to take school seriously. You will love what you learn, because you see it effect your life now, not in some distant future shaded with ideas of college and success.

I Promise to be a better learner by really making an effort to actually understand the material I’m learning in every class. This way, I could actually get something out of what my teachers are teaching me, and I could use that knowledge later on in life when I actually need to use it.

Again, you can use that knowledge now! Ask your teachers why learning biology will help you now! If they don’t have an answer, keep pushing them. You should come up with an answer together. Don’t let them tell you that you will need it in college; that is not good enough.

I Promise to be a better learner by getting more involved in class activities. I will participate in class activities so not only could I share what I learned on the subject, but so I could also hear the other different ways that the same question was answered and that way maybe I could change my way of thinking on that particular question.

There you go! You got it now! Use your friends and classmates and tools for your learning. Share what you learn. Do science experiments at home, design maps write books, create a magazine, make films…bring your school “work” home and make it play, share what you find and you will see that you are learning more than you ever knew possible.

I will leave it to wmchamberlain to see if he wants to share this post with the writer. I don’t want to over step my bounds, but we need to start guiding kids away from “school work” and learning. They are two very different things. In my humble opinion.Let me end by saying great assignment. I love the idea of metacognitive view of learning, and I thinking allowing kids to be reflective learners is crucial to their growth.

Dazed, Amazed, and Determined

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Every teacher probably has their own unique reason for getting into education. Somewhere our motives our probably interconnected in some sort of inspirational lattice, but I am not here to conjecture on why you teach. I want to share a story that elucidates why I got into the business.

Every once in a while, a student does something, or says something that shows the teacher that the hours spent wondering if anything he/she said made any difference in the student’s life. We speak so much about learning and where to find it, and what it looks like, and how to assess it that we have lost touch with any sense of what it means to the life of the children we are dealing with everyday. So consumed are we with skills and content and curriculum that we have forgotten that learning is a long slow process with results we may never see. We plant seeds and tend them the best we can a few hours a day, a few years and then hope that sometime in the future they will bear fruit.

I am here to say that one of my young seedlings from last year just blossomed. James was always mature beyond his age. I always had a hard time understanding how his brain works the way it does, seeing he just finished the seventh grade. Understanding, kind, and deliberate with his learning, he was a pleasure to work with.

In class this past year we struggled with certain themes regardless what we were official meant to be studying.

We looked at the environment and the relationship humans have with it.
We looked at class and how it dictates our relationships.
We looked at how we can work to make the world a better place.

You tell me; how can you assess to see if a 7th grader has learned anything about these insurmountable ideas? Is there a standardized test that can show growth in the field of developing an environmentalist consciousness? Is there a I can give to see if my students are learning that their lives are tightly interconnected with the lives of people spread across the planet? Can we assess the understanding that the way we view the most mundane aspects of our lives is what poetry was meant to do?

Well, today I got a clue. James wrote his first blog post upon returning to his homeland, Nigeria. The fact that he has chosen to carry on with his school blog makes me so proud. It demonstrates that he understands that writing is more than an exercise made monotonous in school. He understands that when faced with emotions that may appear difficult or euphoric it is natural and important to write.

But what did he write, you may ask? The post was not simply a teenager writing about the minutia of his day. You can read the entire post here, and I encourage you to leave him comments. I was also very pleased that he used a CC image and cited it correctly. Without further ado I will share my favorite lines:

I am sitting at the table with the soft music of nature- the wind, blowing in through the windows. I wish I can share in detail how much nature is showing her wonders. From the rustling of the trees up above to the cry of the insects down below. From the whistling of the wandering wind up above, to the hypnotic voice of the woman as she chants while she works, down below. These things cannot just be told, to be understood. They need to be felt to appreciate the remarkable wonders nature as got.

I feel sad and dazed of how much life has changed. Looking back to where I came from and then looking right now to where life’s journey has brought me, there are definitely some differences. I have been here for just a short while and already, I can see the different social classes and their style of living.

Trying to answer that, I started changing my perspective of where I am. Then I started to see the hidden beauties it has. Every time I look outside the car’s window, there are stories all around, stories just around the corner. Stories shown by the way people live, the way people bustle about the streets with emotions that can’t be explained in a thousand words. Stories waiting to be told.

I nearly cried pasting these passages above. Here is a young man who is thinking critically, asking important questions, using a fluid and simple prose to help guide him through his emotions. He sees the poetry in his life and understands it is wrapped in politics and art.

Thank you James. Thank you for listening. Please stay in touch we have important work to do in the years to come…