September+2011

Friday, September 9, 2011.
The student-owned one to one program at Dakota Collegiate has begun! I think we've had a good start, although we are just a few days into the year. Behind the scenes the I.T. department has been upgrading wi-fi, working on getting fiber optic cable trenched to the school, and tweaking a Microsoft Learning Management System (LMS) for us to sink our teeth into. From my vantage point as a classroom teacher, the grade nines are bringing laptops to class, and so far they are working. Some of the students are having a tough time figuring out how to set up their machines to connect with the school's wi-fi, but the in-house Tech support (full time, every day) is helping greatly.

I find my mind wandering back to conversations last year about pedagogy and classroom practice. I know that this year our focus (unfortunately) will likely be on just getting things working, but ultimately I see how students will be empowered to learn in independent and customized ways due to the new tools at their fingertips. 21st Century skills like creativity, collaboration, cross cultural awareness, empathy, (and add the other mercurial intangibles that you wish) are easier to get to because course content is readily available and easier to individualize when students have a computer of their own in front of them, and ready to use.

So what did I learn in school today? I learned all over again that a class with access to Google and Wolfram Alpha needs me nonetheless. They need me to guide and to help them make sense of information. Then need an educated interpreter of the allusions they find. For example, after having the class to a quick Google search for [|//The Pigman//], one student piped up from the back "Hey mine says 'I am Pigman, hear me roar.' " This provided me an opportunity to explain a bit about allusion, and to explain the allusion to the song by [|Helen Reddy]. As a classroom teacher I would not have not made the connection between this liberation anthem and Lorraine Jensen as a precursor of Feminism, and even if I had it would have been a bit awkward for me to sing the song to the assembly of 14 year olds in front of me. In thousands of small ways computer technology connected to the broader internet will enrich the learning and teaching experience in my bricks & mortar classroom.

Every day at Dakota will be an adventure this year. Forward, March!

September 27, 2011.
Things are actually going pretty smoothly on the tech end as we come to the end of the first month of classes. The students in my grade 9 class are consistently bringing their computers, battery life has not been an issue, and most of the students seem to know their way around a browser well enough to navigate to the sites I am asking them to find both inside and outsinde our divisional intra-net.

Figuring out a decent and intuitive LMS is underway. For the time being most of us are still accepting eletronic assignments as email attachments. Also, figuring our appropriate projects and a supporting pedagogy needs some review. All of the groundwork that was done last year in developing a home grown model of 21st C learning and 21C pedagogies is good, but I think we find it easy to fall into our established habits and practices.

None of our worst nightmares came to pass- so after teaching one month in a user owned 1 to 1 environment is working well.