MST PORTAL - Promoting Open, Reflective Teaching & Learning

After several videoconference connections this past semester with pre-service teachers at St. John Fisher College, I finally met them face-to-face for an open Q&A session. Thoughtful questions regarding differentiated instruction, poverty, and technology integration were posed by the students and hopefully I was able to provide a bit of insight and prompt them to think in a different way.

I keep hearing people say, “Kids today know how to use technology.” So given the fact that the majority of these students were <21, I turned the table and asked them a few questions. Here’s a brief sample:

• How do you search for information? Answer: Google
• Who do you learn from? Answer: Classmates & professors
• When does most of your learning take place? Answer: During class
• Have you heard of Web 2.0? Answer: No

Technology can transform teaching and learning, but how do we make that happen? Will the classrooms of these future teachers look any different from a classroom today? Does anything concern you about these responses?

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Dave Waltman, colleague and parent of a Klem South Student, recorded a conversation he had with his daughter using Gabcast. She talks about using various technology tools during our Pond Partners project (Palm Tungsten E2, Pasco science sensors for temperature, and pH, and a voice recorder with an iPod).

Click here to listen in on their conversation. (If anyone can help me embed the audio file into this blog, that would be great.)

Gabcast could be used within the MST PORTAL. Several times I’ve had students talk to “experts” on our class phone and have just used the speaker phone so all could hear. After the conversation we would capture what we could remember in writing. Saving the conversation as an mp3 file would be so much easier as it would provide an opportunity for the students to replay the file and document the discussion more accurately. Now I need to wait for the right opportunity to try it out.

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Brian and I hosted a parent meeting last Thursday to introduce the Pond Partners Wiki. Our goal was to provide parents with information about what a wiki is, how it is used, why we choose to create one for the project, and how their child can contribute and collaborate from home. If you want to see and hear more, check out the ustream.tv video of the meeting.

I checked the wiki last night and two students have already worked on it from home. This is exactly what we were hoping for - to have students add their own knowledge, reflections, and questions to this shared space independent of their teacher and school. For this first attempt with using a wiki, so far I’m pretty excited. I’d love to hear more ideas about ways to continue to foster this experience for the students.

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On Monday the Western New York Powerful Learning Practices (wny-plp) group met face-to-face for the first time. Twenty teams of educators and administrators from around Western New York are participating in a year-long professional development program to engage in collaborative dialog and learning regarding the transformational changes that Web 2.0 tools bring to education. A few of the meetings will be face-to-face, but most will be through Elluminate sessions. I am excited to be a part of the elementary group from Webster and am looking forward to the conversations that will lead to redefining classroom instruction to create vibrant educational experiences for our students.

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After several unsuccessful attempts to connect with SJFC to videoconference with pre-service teachers, the technology finally worked this afternoon. Granted, the quality of the video wasn’t great and there was some annoying audio feedback, but at least Jim Schwartz, Associate Professor of Childhood Education, and I we were able to start our conversations and begin to establish a professional development model for both pre-service and in-service teachers.

The first part of the conversation this afternoon revolved around planning graphing lessons for kindergarteners. The goal was to make the task for collecting data more authentic and meaningful for the students as well as to promote deeper thinking. JoAnna, a kindergarten teacher here at Klem South, was able to also participate in this segment of the videoconference and provided valuable feedback to the Fisher students. A few of the ideas brainstormed included:

• Providing students with last year’s snowfall data and then making predictions for snowfall amounts for the coming winter months. At the end of each month, actual snowfall amounts will be graphed and compared to their predictions.
• Asking the librarian to visit the class and ask the students to help her decide which genres of books should be ordered for the library and why.
• Taking the usual “teeth lost” graph and sharing it with a dentist to see how the data from the class compares with “average” tooth loss.
• Expanding the graphing of local weather data (sky conditions and precipitation) to compare it with locations around the country/world where students have personal connections.

For the second segment of the videoconference, we had a shared conversation regarding ways to make a unit on the water cycle for 2nd graders more inquiry-based. This was a much more demanding task for the Fisher students, but hopefully they walked away from the experience with a greater understanding of the need for students to be able to ask their own questions, test their hypotheses, collect data, and analyze results.

I received an email tonight from Jim and he wrote, “They realize that what they are hearing about from you is on a different level than what they are seeing in their field placements. This is exactly why I wanted this partnership to occur, and so I’m very pleased. It was good, and I believe it can only get better.”

I concur and I can’t wait to continue this journey.

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