Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Alan November, November Learning

Notes taken from November’s talk at the St. Clair RESA Symposium on
21st Century Learning

August 13, 2008

Port Huron High School

• Marco Torres and his students’ video
  • Invite students to step up and be teachers themselves
• My talk is not about technology — it is about new roles
  for the learner and the teacher that are enabled by the technology
  • I am going to suggest that you get rid of your technology
    planning committee
  • What is the problem that technology is trying to solve?
    • We originally focused on teaching — what if we focus
      on learning instead?
    • The solution is not the technology — it is information
      and relationships
  • We need to have a global learning committee
  • Who owns the learning and who should own the learning?
• A Plan to Shift Control of Learning to the Learner
  • Don’t mistake this shift of control as me saying “we
    don’t need the teacher,” because we do and they need to be even more
    creative than before
    • Job 1: Curriculum Review Team
      • Put students in charge of reporting on class
        activities and curriculum review
      • Bob Sprankle’s Room 208 Podcast
      • • Each week, have a student be the official
          photgrapher, recorder, reporter, and producer and these students create
          a curricular review through a podcast
        • The important piece is not about the podcast, but
          about the context for teaching in learning
          • Teachers should bring two kids with them, one of
            them being the “mess up” kid, when they come to technology training
    • Job 2: Tutorial Design Team
      • Bob’s Primefactor video
      • All the children produce short movies about concepts
        presented in class
        • My question — how do you ensure that students get
          all the content if they focus in on producing only short segments
          deeply?
      • Using Jing
        to construct a screencast that can replace long sets of instructions
      • We want children to contribute to the curriculum and
        learn good quality design
    • Job 3: Scribe Team
      • Someone takes the official notes and posts them to
        the class blog
      • Importance of note taking, especially in math as it
        results to operations
      • Google Docs for collaborative note-taking
    • Job 4: Researcher
      • One student is sitting at the computer finding
        answers to questions that are raised in class (not the teacher)
      • Globalizing the curriculum
        • Kiva: loans that change lives — microlending for third world countries
        • Global giving team
    • Help students manage their own learning and contribute
      to their communities, as well as other communities around the globe

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Literacy, New Literacies, New Media, Notes from Other Presentations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.