Connectivism

Call me crazy, but one of the things I enjoy most on a Saturday morning is surfing the world through my iPad.  On my mail, I can find my weekly digests from The New York Times, Education World, my favorite Yahoo groups, and Twitter.  After browsing through the digests and reading some of the suggested articles, I’ll make my way over to my Pulse app and browse through my favorite blogs.  Then I surf through Facebook, and if I have time, I’ll take a look through Google+.

My iPad has been a life-saver for me.  It has opened up my world in ways that a desktop computer was never able to.  While I do occasionally use my iPad to read books, to watch videos, or to play games, more than anything else, I use my iPad to connect with the world.

Those connections were life-saving to me when my daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 10 and I was desperate for answers.  What caused it?  Why were her seizures so different from the typical “grand mal” seizure?  How could a perfectly healthy child suddenly, over a three-week time period, go from having no seizures to seizures every two hours?  Which doctors should we go to?  What are the side effects of the medicines that suddenly had to take?  I had so many questions and knew nothing about this new world that I had been thrust into.  Years back, when I was a child, if my mother had been in a similar situation, she would have found her way to the library and spent time researching.  But now, my world is different.  I hopped on the Internet.  I discovered that Yahoo had several groups centering around epilepsy.  I joined them, and through them began finding answers to some of my questions, developing even more questions, and finding answers to those too, or ideas for other places to go to find the answers.  I joined an online group called Hope for Hypothalamic Hamartomas which allowed me to connect with people from all over the world about a rare condition that causes the type of seizures my daughter was having.  And although my daughter’s epilepsy is now under control, I still continue to participate in those communities and share the knowledge that I have gained over the past couple of years.

Conlan, Grabowski and Smith (2003) state that “In 1999, more than 95% of adults participated in self-directed learning.  Typical learners spend an average of 15 hours per week on a self-directed learning project” (p. 10)  I can definitely count myself as part of that 95%, and, before beginning graduate school at Walden University, I would say that I definitely did spend at least 15 hours a week on self-directed learning.  I’ve used connections that I’ve made through the Internet to learn about my older daughter’s Asperger’s syndrome, to learn about healthier living, to learn about alternative forms of heating a house, and, most recently, to learn about my new car – the Chevy Volt.  The connections that I have formed over the Internet have not only answered my initial questions, but often have created new questions within me, which usually lead to new paths of inquiry, a process that one of my Walden colleagues calls “snowballing” (Hagood, 2013).  

The most important learning that I have participated in through the Internet connections I have made centers around education and technology, two of my biggest passions.  I use Twitter to connect with people whose ideas, thoughts and suggestions I admire, such as Larry Ferlazzo, Pam Moran, and Wesley Fryer, and to connect with organizations and on-line papers, such as Edutopia, the Writing Project, and The New Yorker.  I read tweets that interest me, occasionally respond to some, and tweet interesting ideas and articles to those people who follow me.  I belong to several Diigo groups: Diigo in Education, iPad for Education, and the HC English Department group.  Through these groups, I can link to interesting articles or websites and share those that I find interesting with others.  I also have some Diigo groups for my students that are used for the same purposes.  I belong to several communities on Google+, Facebook, EdWeb and Ning.  In addition, using an app on my iPad called Pulse, I connect to a number of blogs, some based on personal interests and some based on professional interests.  All of them have contributed to my learning in some way.  Finally,  a large part of my personal learning comes from the on-line newspapers that I read.  And while my daily digest of The New York Times brings me to articles that I find most interesting, where most of my learning occurs is from other readers’ responses to the articles.  Unlike some other newspapers, the responses to articles in the New York Times are generally well-written, very thoughtful, and quite educational.  They generally force me to look at the many sides to the issues that are being presented in the newspapers.  This is something that was rarely possible before Web 2.0 opened up the world to us.

I do have to admit that, for the most part, I am a lurker – one of those people who spends a lot of time reading, but not much time participating.  However, this is not a bad thing.  Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989), in the article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” say that “An intriguing role in learning is played by ‘legitimate peripheral participation,’ whereby people who are not directly taking part in a particular activity learn a great deal from their legitimate position on the periphery….It is a mistake to think that important discourse in learning is always direct and declarative.  This peripheral participation is particularly important for people entering the culture.  They need to observe how qualified practitioners behave and talk to get a sense of how expertise is manifest in conversation and other activities”  (p. 26).  I have definitely found in my own experiences that I must lurk for a long time before I am comfortable enough with my new knowledge that I can begin participating and sharing my knowledge with others.  And while I have heard some people say that to be a truly connected learner, you must be participating by posting your own thoughts and ideas, that doesn’t matter to me.  I do post when I have something to share, and maybe one day I will be a very active tweeter or blogger.  But for now, what matters to me, more than anything, is that every day I have the opportunity to connect with people outside of my daily face-to-face world.  I can connect to people who live in very different places and who have had very different experiences, and to people who are going through the same thing that I am going through.  I cannot imagine learning without them.

 

References:

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Conlan, J., Grabowski, S., & Smith, K. (2003). Adult learning. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Adult_Learning

Hagood, A. (2013). [Discussion board post]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_3469735_1%26url%3D.

Resources about Learning

As a teacher, it’s extremely helpful to have an understanding of the brain and how it works.  While I spend a lot of my time reading blogs and books about how to teach reading and writing, I have neglected to spend much time reading about  the brain.  So, to combat that, I’ve found a couple of websites that are great resources for learning more about the brain.

One of my favorite resources is an on-line magazine called Education Week.  While this site is not based completely on the brain, it does include a huge amount of articles, and there are a good number of them that do center around the brain, learning, information processing, and problem solving.  One recent article was “Growth Mindset Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy”.  Another article, published just this week was “Brains and Schools: A Mismatch”.  While you do have to register for the site in order to get access to all the articles, registration is free.  In addition to articles, Education Week also has webinars and videos.

Another resources is the “The Brain and Learning” community on edWeb.net.  The community has multiple resources for its members, including webinars, a blog, discussion forums and a resource library.  Some recent webinars were “5 Myths About Learning: What Neuroscience Tells Us”, “The Impact of Technology on Our Brains”, and “Designing Learning Environments Based on How We Learn”.  If you can’t attend one of the site’s webinars in real time, they are all accessible afterwards in the archives.  

Both of these sites allow you to sign up for a weekly e-mail digest, so that you can see what articles, webinars and blog posts were published during the week.  They are both fabulous resources for anyone interested in learning more about the brain and the things that we need to know about it in order to be better educators.

Instructional Design Resources

The world is a very different place today than it was when I went to college to become a teacher.  In college, I was taught learning theories and teaching strategies and then was sent off into the world to teach.  Aside from some magazines that were dedicated to teaching, there was nothing else to guide me other than the veteran teachers and the teacher’s editions of the textbooks that were used at the schools that I taught in.  However, the world has changed tremendously since then.  I now work in a school that doesn’t use textbooks, so I don’t have a teacher’s edition to guide me.  But most importantly, education is going through huge changes right now due to many factors, one of which being the technology that is now available.  And the technology, in and of itself, is what has become my “professor”.  Over the course of the past ten years or so, I have developed a personal learning network that consists of a group of professionals that communicate their thoughts and ideas through blogs, twitter, webinars, and even old-fashioned conferences.  These people have helped to guide me through the ever-changing educational world.  While there are many bloggers that I follow, the following three blogs are some of the ones that really stand out in my mind.

Read.Write.Connect.Learn. is a blog written by Will Richardson, who used to be an English teacher at the school where I presently work, but who now travels around the country as an educational consultant and public speaker.  The biggest benefit to Richardson’s blog is that he makes the reader really think about the need to fundamentally change how public education is “done”.  He frequently posts links to articles that he has read about education and technology, and includes his thoughts and comments about those articles.  While he doesn’t provide a lot of resources other than some links to some of the books that he has written (which are great, by the way), he does a great job at helping the reader to really consider the problems in the current way that we design instruction in schools today and to envision how instruction can be redesigned through technology.

Another blog that I find useful to follow is Dangerously Irrelevant, by Scott McLeod.  McLeod’s blog offers a variety of resources for the instructional designer.  Similar to Richardson, McLeod questions the present way education is designed in public schools.  But he offers more ideas on how to actually incorporate technology into the classroom than Richardson does.  McLeod also includes many links to schools that have found ways to design instruction differently than the norm, links to resources instructional designers can use, and other information that would be helpful to anyone who is interested in instructional design at the K-12+ level.

The third blog, and my favorite, is Edutopia, which is actually a compilation of posts from a variety of bloggers.  Edutopia is sort of like an online magazine, except all of its articles are written by bloggers.  I like Edutopia because it has more practical tips for the instructional designer than the other two blogs.  It is also extremely easy to search through, so that if you want to find blog posts that revolve around a specific topic or grade level, it is very easy to find some.  I’ve had Edutopia on my RSS feed aggregator for years, and have found that there are multiple posts weekly that pertain directly to instructional design.  It’s one of my most valuable resources as an educator.

They Kept Reading

After 20 minutes of reading, I quietly said to my students, “OK; time to move on.  Find a good place to stop.”

But, they didn’t stop.

They wouldn’t.

And I practically fell to the floor in shock when James yelled out, “No!  I can’t stop now!  Please, can I keep reading?”

This was the boy who, on the first day of class seven days ago, claimed, “I don’t read.”  The boy who, on the second day of class, when I took them to the library, couldn’t find a book to read, and insisted that he hates books.  The boy who, for the past four days, every time I had the students take out their books to read, would do everything that he could to avoid reading.

Over the course of the past four days, I had given him a selection of books to try out, I had quizzed him on his favorite movies and TV shows to get an idea for the type of books he might like, I had tried to redirect him to read every time he was doing anything but, I had ordered him to read.  But every single day for the past four days, he had resisted.

But today he reopened the book that I gave him on our third day, and started reading.  20 minutes later, he was begging me to keep reading.

This is why I love how I’m teaching English now.

In this same class is Cheyenne, who, on the third day of class, came in and said, “This book is so good, Mrs. B!  I was actually reading it at home yesterday.  My mom came in and saw me, and had to look twice because she couldn’t believe that I was reading!”

Also in this class are five other students, most of whom, when they filled out a reading survey at the beginning of the semester, indicated that they never read and they hate reading.  Just seven days ago they filled out that survey, and today they didn’t want to stop reading.  I gave them 10 more minutes, but they still didn’t want to stop.  I ended up completely changing my plans for the day, and letting them read the entire 80 minutes.  I couldn’t bring myself to make them stop.

I’ve been teaching 15 years now, and up until last year, felt very little reward from my job.  Yes, students learned.  They passed tests.  They improved.  But I was teaching what I had to teach and they were learning what they had to learn, and as much as I tried to make it fun and interesting, frankly, it was still pretty boring.  We were all just going through the motions.

Last year I completely changed my style of teaching so that my classes are run as a reading/writing workshop.  My students choose the books that they want to read (with a lot of help from me), and they choose what they want to write about and the types of writing that they want to do.  And as a result, they are excited about the work that they are doing in class.  They don’t want to stop working.  It’s amazing to see.

I will never, ever go back to the traditional way of teaching.  Never.

Teacher

I wrote the following on Saturday morning, December 9th, the morning after the Newtown shootings.  The week had started out with several on-line news articles that resulted in a lot of negative comments about teachers, the majority of which called teachers “greedy”, “lazy”, and “selfish”.  Then, on Thursday, my daughter’s high school was evacuated because of a bomb threat.  Followed by the school shooting in Newtown on Friday.  The following are my thoughts from Saturday morning and was written in honor of the Newtown, CT teachers, and teachers everywhere:

My heart broke last night as I watched the news reports from Newtown, CT.  I cried when I listened to a teacher talk about how she made sure, as she listened to the gunshots outside her door, to take each child’s face in her hands and tell him or her directly, “I love you.”  She thought that they were going to die, and this is what she wanted her children to hear, not the gunshots. 

As I wrote that last line I thought to myself, I probably should say students.  However, the first thing I wrote is what came to my mind.  Children.  For most teachers, our students are our children.  They are not just students.  My own children get mad at me because I come home and talk about “my kids” from school.  But the truth is, my students, during the time that they are with me, are my children.  And I know, without a doubt, that if a gunman came into my school and started shooting, I would hide them, I would put myself in front of them, I would do whatever I had to do to protect them and keep them safe, even if that meant I might die.  And I know that almost every teacher out there would do the same. 

Could you say the same about the people you work with every day?  Would you hide them?  Place yourself in front of them so that the bullet hits you before it hits them?  Do you even think that it’s a possibility that a coworker or an employee of yours is going to come into your workplace and start killing everyone?  Does the possibility of that ever cross your mind?

And yet I go to school every day, knowing that within my school are the mentally ill students, the angry students, the apathetic students, the students who have guns in their houses, the students who are socially isolated, the students who are being bullied by their classmates, the students who for some reason feel picked on…the students who potentially could reach their limit one day and decide to bring a gun to school.

And I teach them.  I also teach the child who, just last week, watched his father drive his car into a tree after forcing the father to let him out of the car first, because he didn’t want to die with his father, even though that is what his father wanted.  I teach the child who writes in her journal about her older sister coming into her room at night and molesting her – memories from when she was younger.  I teach the child whose mother is away at a residential drug rehab program and who started the year herself in a similar place. 

I teach the child who is on the verge of suicide.  I teach the child whose parents’ divorce is so bitter that their e-mails to me about their child spew their venom about their spouse.  I teach the child who is trying so hard to not do drugs, even though he goes home every night and sees mom and dad using them.  I teach the child whose home was just destroyed in Hurricane Sandy.  Even in Hunterdon County, I teach these children, and many more who come to school with similar baggage.  I do my best to try to get them to care about the work that we are doing in school, and to show them that I care about them as people, even though their world is falling apart at home. 

And when that gunman comes into my room, I will hide my children in the corner, barricade us with desks and chairs and whatever else I can find to protect them with.  I will look each one of them in the eyes and tell them that I love them, that they are all special, that they are valued.  And I will put myself in front of them and take the bullet for them.   Because that is what I do. 

I am a teacher.