The Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm
Alan November
Short talk about his consulting comapny and his work aroudn the world.
Notiving a gradual shift of teacher control to student control.
-students taking leading role in creating content and learning experiences
Doing a warm up with promethean feedback devieces.
How often do you think your students walk out of class and wonder, “What just happened?”
-haha. messed up and gave us the answer
What do you think students do about this?
-nothing was the highest response
-correct answer when he posed it to students was “get together in groups and do research.”
Who should own the learning?
-DUh answer with theis group – students
-this isn’t the case. seems like another case of what we want not being applied in real life
Who does own the learning?
-90% thought Teacher own, followed closely by government
Going to show 5 jobs that he think are a framework for shifting control to the students for their own learning
1. Screencasting
-shows a student explaining a factoring example. showing work in real time.
-found it profound that the student said “Thanks for watching.” Was proud of producing this content.
-homework needs to be rethought. what is homework was about creating work that helped the whole class
-mentioned research that a different voice explaining the same content can make a difference in understanding
-all teachers could have students creating learning material
-showed how fast and easy jing is
-cool bit – host:nasa.gov – shows how many sites nasa.gov has
2. Podcasting
-isn’t the podcast that is important. it is the content
-talked about Bob Sprankle’s class in Wells, ME
-reflecting on the curriculum
3. Custom Search
-google custom search
-alternative to everything on the web and targeted search to your curriculum
-told a great sroty of working with kids on cape cod. They asked him or the answers and he encouraged them to find the answer for themselves. his heart sank when he realized that kids had learned to be reliant on teachers instead of empowered.
4. Google Docs
-kids creating and sharing their notes
-why not share notes in class? – encourage collaborative notetaking
-by watching the notetaking as class is going on he gains great understanding from the class
-have a few scribes to not have too many people. rotate that every week. create that one perfect copy of notes
-Homework: reinforces incorrect answers by the delay in response.
-research shows that taking notes from a podcast or recording is better than live lecture
-and we block the devices to have this happen in school -iphone, cell phones, recording devices
5. Kiva
-the micro lending site
-teaching social responsibility
-kivapedia.org
6. Wikipedia
-third grade building the pilot house article
-writing to the biggest collective resource on the planet
-we tell kids not to do a lot of things. should be encouraging the to give to the world. redefine old methods with new abilities
7. Youtube
-blocked in most schools
-were reading number the stars
-kids had to look things up at home
-found a great book trailer on youtube. shouldn’t school be encouraging this type of interaction?
We have underestimated student ability to create meaningful content. Both for learning and teaching. We have so many collaborative tools available to us, we are doing a diservice to them by now engaging them with them.
-mentioned Freidmans article from 6 weeks ago about student deficiencies compared to other countries really
