I have been thinking a lot about digital learning lately, and have gone back in time to think about how I would revise and revisit some of my lessons I created as a high school English teacher to integrate technology to facilitate learning. I got scared for a minute because so much talk is around digital learning that is on-line learning, and saw the shadow of my teacher self becoming irrelevant. I panicked. Then recovered. Right at that moment, I saw a quote by Bill Gates that said, "Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important." Now this is not extraordinarily profound to me, maybe to some, but I have always seen the role as my teacher-self as a facilitator. As I revisited some of the lessons that I did, I realized because I had begun with strong content and standards and thought about pedagogy as I designed the lessons that I could merely find digital tools that accomplished the same outcomes. At the same time I have been watching my own kids and thinking about how we approach life in the digital age. I have come to realize that we are beginning to think in terms of life in the digital world. For example, over the holidays, I was thinking about how I would capture the moments on Instagram and Facebook. When I took a picture or a video, my first thought was how I would put these pics together and caption it to capture the story of the moment. My 14 year old daughter also thinks in terms of digital tools. When we were out playing the other day, I decided that I would indeed take a spin on a sled. Her first reaction , "Stop. I have to video this." Technology does not have to be the latest or greatest app. My 11 year old son adores cooking. One day when we were cooking. He admonished me and showed me how to cut up an onion. He proudly claimed, "I saw that on the Food Network." The point here is that learning is in perpetual motion. What did I do today when I needed to know how to curve text in GIMP? I searched it on Youtube! Even my wife has begun to catalog her story on Facebook with digital images. Recently being diagnosed with breast cancer, you can see her feed and the story unfolds... the chemotherapy, the quotes, the thank-yous, the highs and the lows.
As we are capturing our lives in digital soundbites, often our classrooms I have discovered are not harnessing this extraordinary moment in education. Some are caught in the past big time. Recently, my son brought home an assignment. This assignment I talk about a lot in workshops. It was a word puzzle that had the students locate key literary terms like alliteration (Could never find it in the puzzle), clarity, simile, etc.. We spent about 25 or 30 minutes looking for these words, and lingered on alliteration, which was backwards in the puzzle. Now, I am all for looking to find things in a puzzle, but I was thinking, well we could have spent 30 minutes doing something on-line to give us greater insight into these words-- their meaning, examples or even writing examples. Likewise my 8th grade daughter has brought home similar assignments. I am not bashing the teacher or the school. I use this as an example because my daughter connects more with people via her Musicaly account than anywhere else. She staged, narrated and shot a video montage of her Christmas goodies to show others and asked them to share their Christmas thoughts and posted it via musically. She got over 200 hits from all over the country. In that moment, she harnessed the power of technology to plan and create and publish a video. This was not just some random teenage video. It was highly planned and highly orchestrated. Now, I support responsible technology with my kids, so I follow them on all social media at this point. My point is she was connected to people both here in her town, but to people all over the world. In that moment, there was a shared understanding of being a teenager!
My son, likewise, understands the power of technology-- pushed on by me somewhat I am sure. He demands engagement at all levels. He sees no value in being compliant with work that he deems not useful in school. Now, he is a compliant student, so he does the work without causing a scene, but he knows there are better ways of doing his work. He loathes annotation; my English teacher self just shrivels when I hear him complaining about having to annotate. My hobby was annotating and writing thoughts in the margin and underling. I was in high cotton when I could annotate a text. What I realized recently that annotating was a way that I processed (and it is an important skill), but isn't the purpose of annotating to become connected with the text? to relate to it? to understand it? I realized that he could read and understand what was happening in the story. Comprehension is not his problem (just watch him devour a SI Kids Magazine) and tell you all the stats! Connection is his problem. We were reading a story one night by Ray Bradbury, "One Summer in a Day." The story is about a group of children who have not seen the sun in 7 years. A young student who came from Earth explains that the sun is a miraculous thing. The other students bully her and lock her away and the one day when the sun comes, she misses it all because of this terrible act by a group of others. My son read it and was immediately turned off because he understood what happened in the story, for he had to underline stuff and draw pictures in the margin (the teacher had sent home a detailed graphic of what annotating looks like after all). He also had to find examples of figurative language. I was in heaven, of course.
What I realized in that moment is that he just wanted to get it done, and I did not pass this off as a petulant kid just wanting to get to his XBox, though I was thinking that XBox was better than this. He didn't even get to the point of the story that the impact of bullying on others can cause one serious emotional harm and others' viewpoints are important (maybe this would be good to hear in our political climate!) What he saw was a story that he had to dissect with a certain numbers of circles and lines and pictures and then find all of the similes, metaphors, and personification. However, he did not have to explain why the imagery in the story was related to him and how the imagery of the sun the little girl described made it more heart-breaking at the end when she was denied that splendor because someone else made a decision for her. How cool would it have been to have students think about the impact of bullying in schools and write a blog or make a vlog or have a collaborative on-line discussion and then bring it back to the story?
I am again not bashing the teacher at all. I am thinking that we do not harness the natural inclination for storying that kids have today. This story is relevant to kids in middle school particularly, and I agree that the story has two levels, a literary level and a humanistic level. A middle schooler is likely not to get too enthusiastic about the literary level, so getting him or her engaged on the human level could open the door for the other.
Merely, what I am saying is that kids today have an inclination to tell personal stories and they have the tools to share those beyond anything that I had when I was younger. We do not want to discount the impact that digital learning has on kids. General Eric Shinseki once said, "If you do not like change you will like irrelevance less." My hope and desire is for teachers and students to find their relevance and to uncover their stories and pass them on...
