Two metaphors I often hear our Director of Instruction, Gary Kern, evoke while discussing our work with technology are the faucet and the pool. They are ones I find myself repeating more, as we explain the work we are doing with digital literacy.
In a typical district, school or class, the adults control the supply of technology that students use to support their learning. While the district may have invested millions to support all students with digital literacy, in some classes the technology faucet is turned off; in others it is a slow drip, while others have it open wide. We are trying to allow all students some steady flow of technology to support their learning — regardless of a particular school or class. And, while some will enhance the experience, all students will have basic access.
In K-3, all students in West Vancouver have access to Dreambox (I have written about this program before here). In some classes it is part of the school day, but all students can access it from home, and all parents can access the analytics to see the areas where they can support their children. In Grades 4-12, we are just beginning to explore what is possible with student dashboards. Gary Kern, recently wrote about them here. All students have email, instant messaging, storage, and a series of other tools which allow them to collaborate in a safe environment. All students can actually instant message the superintendent (and four have so far). We are not turning the technology faucet on full, but we are creating a steady stream for all students. Students can explore how they can ethically use digital tools to support their learning.
It is difficult to teach kids to swim without getting them into the pool. And, this is also true of being good digital citizens — we can’t teach digital citizenship without giving students a safe digital space to experiment, learn and grow in. Again, the student dashboards are part of the latest effort to teach our students to swim in the digital world. And better yet, we know that when we get into the water with the kids, it is even easier. We also know we need to continue to support administrators, teachers and parents in the digital world to be more comfortable swimming in the water with their kids. While some take the approach that the technology pool, although very inviting, is closed with large, raised fences around it — we are taking a different approach. We want to be able to say that all our kids know how to swim safely.
Turning on the faucet for all children and jumping in the water with them does challenge the status quo. Giving all students access to some technology and expecting all students will have some ability to navigate in a digital environment is not the norm. If we believe what Coquitlam administrator, David Truss recently wrote, that education is going to be increasingly open and distributed, we need to support students for this world.
There are times when I wish this fall looked more like last fall — it would make life easier but, of course, it would not be the right thing to do. It will continue to be exciting to see what happens as we open the faucet and jump in the pool with our students.
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Chris – the initiative to help students navigate the digital environment is admirable. In the rush to embrace technology, I think there’s a need to step back and ask ourselves about how best to approach this systematically. For example, are the social media skills the ones the schools need to focus on or is there a need to address more prosaic skills first — using a word processing program effectively, working with spreadsheets, mastering PowerPoint or other presentation programs, etc. What about typing? These are concerns that have been expressed to me by other parents, too.
In presenting the Dashboard, there was an implicit acceptance and promotion of social media. But, there are many who have very valid concerns about the proliferation of social media and there are parents who are not social media users themselves.
More specifically, I don’t understand why there wasn’t a staged rollout. For example, giving the Grade 4s a particular template and then adding features for each successive year to reflect growing abilities, skills, and discernment.
I also think that the overemphasis on chat is developing a culture of inanity rather than the collaborative learning space which may have been imagined. I’m sure that this improves as the students grow and as the teachers hone their use of the technology, but for now — as a friend of mine says — the messages tend to be of the “hey, hi how’s it going” variety. There may be nothing wrong with this, but do we have to computerize it?
My greatest concern with the Dashboards though is in the selection of friends. Again, I think this could have been approached differently and changed over time as students learned to work with the system. For the earlier years, Grade 4 and 5, for example, I would have kept the system to the classroom only and I would have made sure that every member in the classroom was included as a “friend” on every other student’s dashboard. That’s how we build inclusiveness rather than emphasizing exclusion. This feature could then be adjusted with each year – for example, opening up the friend selection system in Grade 6 to all Grade 6 and 7 divisions within a school and then throughout the District in Grade 7. By Grade 8, the floodgates would be off.
I guess I’m that sandwich generation: too old to have the electronic age imprinted in my DNA and yet a significant computer user. So, thanks for opening up the topic with your blog today and I look forward to seeing how this initiative rolls out in the District over the next few years.
This is so interesting. As an online University, we only use technology to teach our adult learners. With the world changing at such a rapid pace with technology it is so important that as educators we maintain and update the way we view education and technology. Without technology Janus University (www.janusuniversity.edu) would not be!
As we continue to work together with students and educators in our classrooms to develop skills in digital literacy, it’s important to focus on the learning journey. We have established guidelines for classroom support and an implementation plan based on specific lessons that incorporate inquiry based learning through digital writing for our Grade 4-7 students.
One of the key changes in our instructional strategies is that of terminology. Dashboards now specify “Learning Networks” rather than “Friends” as we encourage our students to work together through the Inquiry process, sharing resources, ideas, providing constructive feedback and planning for next steps. These Learning Networks will be a key aspect of the Inquiry process and will help students to facilitate skills important for the future.
Students will also be able to “Archive” their work, building on their understanding as they learn new things. They can save Science projects, videos of themselves peer teaching Math algorithms, exploratory essays about Egyptian engineering or whatever else they deem valuable to be used to scaffold learning in the future. This may be an answer to files of duotangs discarded in the recycling bin at the end of term. If students value their work, they can archive it. We hope that the learning is transformational and more relevant to their real world experiences.
The metacognitive aspect of this learning can be extremely powerful.