Learning in 21st Century Style

Well, I had my first crack at ThinkDots this week. I was skeptical at first, maybe because I was at a loss as to where to start. I’m still having trouble with the concept of tiering and having students grouped according to learning ability or knowledge. I think there is real value and benefit having students working with peers that can pull them up alongside and encourage. In Saskatchewan, we have moved away, not completely, from a segregation approach to an inclusion approach. At one time, we had special classes for low achieving students, or pulled them out to resource. Some of this still happens because of the local administrators philosophy of education, but the trend now is more inclusion and work with students alongside peers. So the idea of grouping students according to ability for a ThinkDot activity still rubs me the wrong way. So I designed a ThinkDot activity around interest.

As many of you know, I am working on a social responsibility course. So I decided to create a ThinkDot for this course. I decided to have the students look at one third world country, but from two different perspectives. I think there is danger, when looking at third world issues of only focusing on the negatives, so I created to different activities where culture, art, and language were highlighted in one group, and the other examining the social, health, and poverty issues.

Here’s what I came up with. Hope it makes sense. In the end, I felt pretty good about this process and believe it will interesting for the students.

Choose a third world country you would like to understand better and do a PowerPoint presentation to the classroom. Search these countries by going to The World Factbook and www.globalissues.org. Students can use the website: http://www.nanogames.com/dice.php to roll the dice for which order the activities are completed. The first Thinkdot focuses on the interest area of culture, and the second on social concerns. What I think is important is that the students do the thinkdot for the same country, because then the students get to see the wealth of culture a country possesses in contrast with the poverty materially and physically.

Table 1: Cultural Activities

Table 2: Social Activities

Well, I’m awake here at 4AM, and I would rather be sleeping, but that seems how it is lately. Some people say it comes with age, others say it is stress, others just nod and shrug the shoulders. In any case, I would love to be sleeping right now, but instead I am writing, because there is a connection to sleep and education.

For years as a teacher, I watched tired children falling asleep in class because they had stayed up so late watching TV, or playing video games all night and no one sent them to bed. Or if they did go to bed, the video games or TV were in their bedroom, and they stayed up anyways. I saw the effects of no sleep in my students, and it was a negative in most cases. Students attention spans were non-existent, they lacked interest in the subject at hand, they performed poorly in tests and quizs, they rarely contributed to group or class discussions, and they could also be very disruptive.

Now before I make assumptions that every student was tired because they were simply staying up playing or watching TV, I realize there were some situations where students were tired because of family situations that were not good. Sometimes, these students were up because parents were out all night and they were left in charge and they couldn’t do much about that. But that was only some of the situations.

My point that I’m trying to make in relation to games, and particularly video gaming, is that while I am not opposed to them in general, I am opposed to the over playing of video games that keeps people up all night and not sleeping when they need to practice moderation and turn them off at a reasonable time. I think parents need to monitor more carefully what games their children play, and how much time they spend playing them in solitude when they could be interacting with other people on a social level.

Maybe we need to spend more time explaining the effects of poor sleep patterns to students and the importance of sleep, how much sleep they need, and more. Just my thoughts while I lay in bed wishing I could be asleep myself. Maybe I’ll have a nap later while you read this.:)

I know one of my kids favourite pastimes is playing board games or card games during the holidays, and especially “Stratego”. That’s usually the only time we can get together as a family. But do they love to play games. I guess my kids learned to love playing games from my mother. She is fierce competitor when it comes to games. Thankfully, I was able to tame any extreme “game playing” behaviours in my children, before they morphed into my mother. (She knows it, so I’m not telling any family secrets!) However, I truly acknowledge my mother’s love for playing games in her senior years. Sadly, the older we get, I think we get crotchety and forget how to have fun and play. There is something appealing about a child’s desire for play that I wish for myself. I’m not sure why I been so reflective in my blogs lately.

Back to the subject at hand; there is a place for play in the classroom. It is not to be confined to the playground, the monkey bars, the jungle gyms, or the lighter or easier subject areas either. I really believe that we need to develop youth as multifaceted, whole beings. As much as we develop their intellect, we need to balance it off with the laughter and fun. That’s as much an intellectual pursuit as the more serious minded stuff of academia. Just like we balance between critical and creative thinking with application and doing, we need to introduce games and play to balance the serious quest for knowledge and understanding.

When I first started teaching, we played a lot of games in the classroom. I was a trained high school teacher completely out of his element teaching grade 2/3. It was my first teaching job, and I flew by the seat of my pants most of the time. My daybook was mostly filled with scribbles of what I changed on the fly, because what I had planned was often a complete failure. The students I inherited from the previous grade were left unable to read and write, because the teacher spent most of her time behind the desk doing beadwork. So I read, and read, and read to these students. I acted out scenes, changed my voice, entertained mostly! But the students had fun, and one by one, lights went on as they began to associate letters and groupings of letter with words and sounds. So much of this was accomplished with play. We made games of childrens books. We did the same with math, science, social studies, and health. Everything was an object lesson.

I remember the day I sat down at my desk and found a louse on my desk upside down. I ran down to the science lab and grabbed a microscope and slide. I put the louse on the slide with clear piece of tape and had each student look into the microscope and see the live louse with it’s legs moving and heart beating. I had every student after that sign up for a shower program. But we turned what might have been an embarrassing situation into a fun learning experience.

I think we need more play in the classroom than we see. We can be too serious about mastering the curriculum outcomes and forget we can get there with engagement by games and play as well.

Check out Dr. Stuart Brown’s video on the value of play:

For the past four years, I have been slogging away at trying to get our online school to a place where it could run without me. I mean this really. For the first four years, if I had walked away from it, it would have died. Not because no one else could have done the job, but rather we were so limited in resources and funding, we couldn’t afford additional help. We had a very small extremely dedicated staff that did there job and two others at the same time. But finally things have changes, and we have better funding in place, and new staff, with great results. The team has just got better.

Unfortunately, some of us, who have been at it since the beginning are almost worn out though. Hopefully, we can ride their enthusiasm for awhile and catch a fresh new breeze of life and rejuvenation. Today, was one of those days, where I had to smile at the end of a long exhausting day, and see one of the staff get up from his laptop and say, “I just emailed all of the perfect attender students and thanked them for their commitment to coming to school.” I could only smile and think, “Wow, that is so good to hear.” I want the best for our students. I want them to have positive experience. But the truth is, some of them come from really difficult home lives. But now we have a team that cares, and drives four hours one way today to visit 11 students and talk to them and encourage them, even though those students have nothing really to go home for, besides babysitting or watch tv.

I am finally feeling like I am not shouldering this challenge alone. The team has gotten bigger and they are rallying around each other, and it feels good. It really is great to have good staff!

As part of this course, I need to start a blog using WordPress, and I must admit it is a bit of stretch for me. I use Blogger (I think I can say those words on this site) regularly. In fact during this entire course, I have been trying to keep my blog up with thoughts and ideas that I could share with my eTeachers at Credenda, that might be helpful for them. So I have been blogging all along, but using Blogger. Now I have to start a new blog using the Discovery Education blog, and I’m not all that happy about having to maintain two blogs. But I am going to try.

Herein, my point about adapting. We ask our students to adapt all the time to the learning environment around them. We also adapt a great deal to their learning styles as well. So it’s only fair, that even though I am getting older, I still need to adapt to the expectations set upon me and try to learn from situation.

So what can I learn from this:

• I get to try out WordPress and see if I like it any better than Blogger,
• I get to try different skins or themes out that are not available to Blogger users,
• I get to write and have colleagues give me some feedback.

In the end, it’s all good.