At BLC05 Listening to Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab talk about how we need to take the conepts of learning from kindergarten and apply them throughout education. About how there is a growing recognition that success in the future is going to depend on acting and thinking creatively, yet schools give little opportunity for students to develop as creative thinkers. He’s giving great examples of kids really invested in projects that they’re designing and creating. As I’m sitting here, I’m thinking about how much I want my own kids to be among those that he’s talking about. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time reading the works on his site Lifelong Kindergarten and trying to figure out how to provide these types of experiences for them. (Looks like I’m going to have to dive into MindStorms…) And, trying to figure out how teachers and students can use Read/Write Web technologies in inventive ways.
Guiding Principles: 1. Learning through design. 2. Following your interests. 3. Enouraging emergent community (natural collaboration, mentors). 4. Cultivating and environment of respect and trust. Now he’s showing a program called Scratch, which is pretty amazing. And he’s saying that the knowledge we build from the information we have access to is important, but what is more important is moving toward where success and satisfaction will depend on the ability to think and act creatively.
There have been a couple of keynoters here that have talked about how enabling students to pursue their passions in creative ways not only allows them to become more effective learners but also builds their self-esteem and become imporant parts of their communities. I think that’s where these technologies fit. Obviously, these are primarily asynchronous tools. And I believe they are more than just publishing tools. I’ve been in blogvangelism mode all week, and the good news is that no one, not one person in either of my Intro to the Read/Write Web sessions raised his or her hand when I asked if anyone did NOT know what a Weblog was. Watershed moment. But it’s getting time to get beyond that. Kids are embracing these tools in creative ways…the job now is to not let the system suck the life blood out of them.
My brain hurts. This has been a great, great conference, both in terms of the really provocative learning that’s taken place an in the community of learners that’s been built. This is, in my mind, the best technology and learning conference I’ve been to, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.
Tags: BLC05, Alan November
In Scotland we have been trying to encourage creativity in the classroom for a few years now, with limited success. Like you say, many of the good pedagogies come from the ‘early years’ sector, while in Secondary schools (11-18) we dawdle on in our subject specialisms.
However, there are some superb examples that we are trying to spread around the upper schools. One is the use of Digital Video or iStopMotion technologies to create short films and animations in foreign languages. I did this at the end of term with my students and they *loved* it. There are examples from the West coast of Scotland at edublogs.
One important point is that the teachers who are using Scratch, Squeak, StarLogo and other technologies need to start blogging about it. These aren’t commercial products, and they just have been completely unable to generate any buzz. Squeak is profound technology, and nobody wants to stick their neck out for it.
Mindstorms is very cool as is the school equivalent, Microworlds. i’ve been using both MW and Squeak with my students over the past 3 years since I got back from the Stonington Retreat in Maine. I can tell you that when the kids get a look at these learning tools, you can’t hold them back.
The first year we weren’t too cool. I didn’t know my way around the software but we forged ahead with old versions. The MW documentation is very good and mathcats has tons of great ideas for starting out. Squeak is another matter and the documentation stinks. In both cases, they have a listserve community that is vibrant and extremely helpful…no matter how dumb the question.
The second year we started doing animations and exploring some basic geometry concepts. What would happen is that the kids would go and download the software at home and come with their assignments finished. So I had to keep thinking of new things to do…like add a projectile to their game and teaching them what this meant in terms of physics so they could think about how to program it. We also added in robotics. Both softwares allow you to do robotics and when we started thinking about robotics as something more than vehicles…like waving flowers when music starts or turning on a fan when someone walked by artwork that had fabric strips in front of it….well, you can imagine where the kids went with it. We also tried to start writing our own Squeak documentation.
Then this past year, our third year, the kids just exploded. mind you…the 8th graders now 2 years of experience. The animations spilled over into games. Multilayer games with some pretty sophisticated hand-drawn characters. We also used MW to do some really need collaborative projects with kids in 2 locations jointly building a robot that could dance. The idea was to give them a universal command name and then have everyone come together and watch all these bots dance on command…each in their own unique way based on what that student wanted. Well, it was a roaring success and they wanted to then do in with animation. So they build common backgrounds around themes, traded bots via the export feature and then we had a dance marathon…country/punk, sports rock and so on.
Who knows where it will go from here.
But here’s the rub. Although my district bought all 8 middle school site licenses and Squeak is free, only 3 even use the programs. The other 2 only do minimal stuff because they’re very “busy” teaching Office and web authoring. Call me cynical, but I think they’re too freaked by the change in control. Yes, these three years have been out of control because I don’t know the answer more than I do. But it’s been OK because WE (the kids and I) find out together. It’s also very hard to find folks who want to “talk” about using this kind of software because it is so 180 degrees opposite of drill/kill. I know others feel really dumb when they start using it, but I got over it. (I guess that’s how I feel now that I’m about to try and learn how to podcast so my kids can publish math lesson updates for their parents. I’m overwhelmed.)
Next year I am leaving that school and going to a different one. I plan on still using both Squeak and MW. But now I am officially a math and science teacher. So if I can find computers, I’m still going to use these modeling softwares.
Wouldn’t it be great to find other teachers who were using this stuff and build more professional development support? that’s ongoing and available.