Pencil Suites and Power Cuts

Day 24 of #28daysofwriting.  Almost over.  I am a little sad.  I know I will remain active on my blog, I love the habit too much now.  Maybe I’ll do #52weeksofwriting and write for 52 min once a week!

We celebrate new innovation.  The shiny new gadgets we have in the classroom…

I have a really great tool I would like to share.  Beautifully simple, it is accessible by all students, it is very intuitive, anyone can use it.  It requires no charging, which in a classroom environment is amazing.  It can help students to share their learning and develop their creativity.  Mistakes can be addressed really easily.  It is made of eco-friendly materials, and unlike tradition tech, it can be disposed of easily at the end of its life.  Everyone who isn’t using one needs to right now!

It’s a pencil…We don’t celebrate it, we don’t spout its benefits from the hilltops. We don't have Pencil Suites where teachers fight to try and get their class extra time on the school pencils. It gets the job done though.  Students use it when and how they need to share their learning.  So if we don’t celebrate the pencil why do we get all evangelical over the newest i-chrome-app-web-2.0-gadget?  Is it going to replace the teacher… I sure hope not because I like my job.

I am an avid supporter of tech in the classroom.  I think it is the vehicle for learning, an amazing tool that opens up learning possibilities for our students.  I know that I have blogged about useful web tools and apps and I have always tried to explain and justify their use in a classroom programme.  But apps and tools alone do nothing without some serious pedagogy behind what you do.

I was thinking today as @BridgeeNZ and I explained what we did with team teaching last year when we had too few devices.  I realised that underpinning everything we did were some core beliefs around learning.  

The Four C’s was one idea we tried to weave through our programmes.  Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication and Collaboration.  To do this we made sure that what we were doing with tech to achieve these goals was reflected in the pen and paper work the students did.

We tried to make learning fun,  relevant.  We tried to make sure our learning tasks were scaffolded and allowed students to use multiple ways to share learning.  We excited the students about their learning.

The last few nights I have been blogging about how I am starting my Daily 5 journey.  I know that tech will enhance what I am doing, apps will be used and YouTube videos will be watched.  But none of these things replace me, the teacher.  If the power goes off, or the internet drops out, I will still be able to continue.  Because the pedagogy of what I am doing sits within the Daily 5 and best literacy practice.

I saw this great little image tweeted by Shawn Blankenship (@Blankenship_S) and it really reinforced that our conversations around tech should always come back and focus on the learning outcomes, not the tools themselves.

So if your school has a Pencil Suite or if you panic at the idea of having no devices tomorrow maybe you should rethink what is really important in what you are doing, what are the big ideas and pedagogy that would still be important without the devices and apps. And then be thankful we live in a time where these devices are available!