Last December, at Online Educa Berlin 2010, nearly two hundred teachers and head teachers defied the cold and snow on December 1st to gather at the second School Forum and hear about rich learning environments.
The forum opened with a presentation by Duane Sider, Learning Director of Rosetta Stone, on ‘Digital Natives: How they Learn and How we Teach’. Russell Stannard, principal lecturer at Warwick University in England and instigator of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, found that teachers are often willing to use new technologies but do not know where to start. Young learners are generally more comfortable with web tools and other technologies than most experienced teachers. Highly anticipated was the presentation of Sugata Mitra, the Indian professor of ‘Hole in the Wall’ fame. The inspirational professor spoke about just how well children can learn independently, when in groups and when motivated. Sugata’s most recent project involves experiments with what he calls the Granny Cloud: two hundred British grandmothers who have, for the last two years, offered children instructional support over the Skype communication system. According to the professor, a ‘motivational granny’ is all children need to learn effectively within a Self Organised Learning
Environment (SOLE).
Besides the presentations, a wide range of interactive demonstrations revealed useful and exciting tools, projects and resources for teaching. A small group of primary school children effortlessly used an interactive whiteboard to demonstrate their e-twinning platform. Other demonstrations showed virtual experiments and online games, learning management systems, personal learning networks, interactive language software and educational platforms. The teachers programmed robots and tried out different learning tools, both open source and proprietary. The forum concluded with a lively discussion between the presenters and the audience, showing once more the need for rich learning environments in which teachers motivate and facilitate, and learners collaborate and share.
A blog about Learning and Technology; New Learning for everyone within the digital comfortzone.
Monday 31 January 2011
Sunday 23 January 2011
Visual learning
This morning I read in a Digital Newsletter for German educators ('Der Lehrerfreund') that they now have a section on hands-on examples of technical processes in our everyday environment. Such as 'how does frost create cracks in the asphalt', or 'what happens exactly when you burn sugar'? Great! I thought. German education is discovering the advantages of visual learning, and how digital technology can be used to bring the outside world into the classroom. Filled with anticipation I opened the links, only to find the piece on frost and cracks involving a lot of text and a few graphics which repeated what was said in the written text. If you'd print it, you would have a regular book, as German students have known it since Gutenberg printed his bible. Although it might have been hard to video capture the process of cracks occurring in asphalt because of frost, it should be a piece of cake to do this for the process of burning sugar. My hopes up again, I opened that link, expecting to find some YouTube link showing me tantalising close ups of melting, bubbling and caramelising sugar on a flame. But alas, the Lehrerfreund Techie limits himself to a mere picture:
.
I'm not saying that a graphic is not informative; but why use the Internet and digital technology to explain something you can also find in a regular science book?
Digital technology offers an extended educational value ; it makes learning visual and interactive. There is a sweet video for instance, about a kid who is burning sugar, filmed by his friend. The visual quality of 'the sugar mellting experiment' is not great and while you watch, you keep hoping the kids will not burn down the house in their enthusiasm as aspiring scientists, but the amateur experiment clearly shows you what happens to the sugar. The kids also comment on the smell and mention how it burns ("See, now it starts to burn, and that's black"). We see the sugar melting and caramelising, turning black, but no flame appears. Luckily, the kids turn off the stove afterwards.
This amateur video might actually be a classical learning moment for primary school kids; ask your students to come up with a definition of burning. If you define burning as something catching fire, it seems that sugar needs more than just heat; a catalyst needs to be added to the sugar, as our technical Lehrerfreund has tried to explain to us. What would that look like?
A ten-second search on YouTube yields the following video:
.
It is a German video, from www.netexperimente.de As with any proper German product it is solid, devoid of any sense of humour, and to the point. It starts off with a professional version of what the kids in the kitchen did. There is a bunsen burner, a beautiful cone of sugar (how did they do that?!) and a steady camera. You can imagine the scientist behind the camera, wearing safety goggles and holding his or her breath, as not to disturb the experiment in any way. At first the sugar doesn't catch flame, although it bubbles and turns black; same result as the kids in the kitchen. The follow-up experiment shows the sugar cone covered in ash, which after prolonged burning does catch fire. The video has been sped up for the sake of the impatient YouTube generation - in a matter of a few minutes the white sugarcone turns into a smouldering, flaming towering inferno. Well, not exactly an inferno perhaps; but it does catch fire at some point, because of the ash. Conclusion: sugar needs a catalyst (ash) to burn.
The comments on the video are interesting as well; some students talk of the experiments they did, others comment on it. One doesn't understand the purpose of it, the other one wonders why it didn't catch fire better; one student suggest that perhaps too much ash was used in the experiment. Smart kid. By the way, this was the only German comment; perhaps the smart kid found the solution in his science book...
.I'm not saying that a graphic is not informative; but why use the Internet and digital technology to explain something you can also find in a regular science book?
Digital technology offers an extended educational value ; it makes learning visual and interactive. There is a sweet video for instance, about a kid who is burning sugar, filmed by his friend. The visual quality of 'the sugar mellting experiment' is not great and while you watch, you keep hoping the kids will not burn down the house in their enthusiasm as aspiring scientists, but the amateur experiment clearly shows you what happens to the sugar. The kids also comment on the smell and mention how it burns ("See, now it starts to burn, and that's black"). We see the sugar melting and caramelising, turning black, but no flame appears. Luckily, the kids turn off the stove afterwards.
This amateur video might actually be a classical learning moment for primary school kids; ask your students to come up with a definition of burning. If you define burning as something catching fire, it seems that sugar needs more than just heat; a catalyst needs to be added to the sugar, as our technical Lehrerfreund has tried to explain to us. What would that look like?
A ten-second search on YouTube yields the following video:
.
It is a German video, from www.netexperimente.de As with any proper German product it is solid, devoid of any sense of humour, and to the point. It starts off with a professional version of what the kids in the kitchen did. There is a bunsen burner, a beautiful cone of sugar (how did they do that?!) and a steady camera. You can imagine the scientist behind the camera, wearing safety goggles and holding his or her breath, as not to disturb the experiment in any way. At first the sugar doesn't catch flame, although it bubbles and turns black; same result as the kids in the kitchen. The follow-up experiment shows the sugar cone covered in ash, which after prolonged burning does catch fire. The video has been sped up for the sake of the impatient YouTube generation - in a matter of a few minutes the white sugarcone turns into a smouldering, flaming towering inferno. Well, not exactly an inferno perhaps; but it does catch fire at some point, because of the ash. Conclusion: sugar needs a catalyst (ash) to burn.
The comments on the video are interesting as well; some students talk of the experiments they did, others comment on it. One doesn't understand the purpose of it, the other one wonders why it didn't catch fire better; one student suggest that perhaps too much ash was used in the experiment. Smart kid. By the way, this was the only German comment; perhaps the smart kid found the solution in his science book...
Tuesday 4 January 2011
Cyberbullying
I am 12 and on Facebook. I am not supposed to be there, because I am under 13, the legally required FB age. But they make it so easy to lie, so I'm here, with my entire class and all the other parallel classes. I have not 'friended' any kids I don't like, only the ones that seem nice. And cool. It's very important to be cool on FB. It's like another hallway in school, where kids can bump in to you, and check you out. Only, it is much easier to check you out. And call you names. Someone tagged a pretty dumb picture of me the other day. So that picture showed up on my wall. Including the comments. 1. Hey dude, you look soooo lame! 2. Aren't you the most popular kid in school, wahaha!! 3. Dumb f*ck!! 4. Gawd you're ugly XD..... And so on. One comment followed another. I deleted the picture from my wall, but the writing continued, as I heard from kids in school. It seemed the most popular pastime. And I can't do anything about it....
An excerpt from an online diary. The case seems innocent enough; some remarks on a picture. But the willfull and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices is nothing less than cyberbullying. Why do kids do it? Because they can. Bullies, both in the classroom and in cyberspace, need attention themselves and have only learned to get it the nasty way. If parents are not aware of their children, then the teachers have to be all the more so. A teachers's job in the 21st century has to include digital awareness, in all its aspects. Knowing what social networks are, and how kids communicate. As much as the classroom has been extended into hyperspace, so has the school hallway. And both parents and teachers need to keep their eyes wide open. Discuss cyberbullying in the classroom. Ask the students to write an essay about the topic, and see what happens. If there are problems, try to tackle them through role-play and discussion groups with mediators.
The above diary excerpt is fictious, but could be written by kids any time. The Cyberbullying Research Center informs students that cyberbullying is when someone “repeatedly makes fun of another person online or repeatedly picks on another person through email or text message or when someone posts something online about another person that they don’t like.” Using this definition, about 20% of the over 4,400 randomly‐selected 11‐18 year‐old students in 2010 indicated they had been a victim at some point in their life.
An excerpt from an online diary. The case seems innocent enough; some remarks on a picture. But the willfull and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices is nothing less than cyberbullying. Why do kids do it? Because they can. Bullies, both in the classroom and in cyberspace, need attention themselves and have only learned to get it the nasty way. If parents are not aware of their children, then the teachers have to be all the more so. A teachers's job in the 21st century has to include digital awareness, in all its aspects. Knowing what social networks are, and how kids communicate. As much as the classroom has been extended into hyperspace, so has the school hallway. And both parents and teachers need to keep their eyes wide open. Discuss cyberbullying in the classroom. Ask the students to write an essay about the topic, and see what happens. If there are problems, try to tackle them through role-play and discussion groups with mediators.
The above diary excerpt is fictious, but could be written by kids any time. The Cyberbullying Research Center informs students that cyberbullying is when someone “repeatedly makes fun of another person online or repeatedly picks on another person through email or text message or when someone posts something online about another person that they don’t like.” Using this definition, about 20% of the over 4,400 randomly‐selected 11‐18 year‐old students in 2010 indicated they had been a victim at some point in their life.
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21st Century Learning
- SheLearner
- Teacher, trainer, Head of IT, mum of three online teens, into social networks, open educational resources and visual learning. Head in the Global Cloud and feet in the Dutch clay.