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!

Goodbye Dear Friend

Today is a sad day for me… I have to say goodbye to a very dear friend.  We have worked closely for the last year and he has taught me so much about how I can work better, share with others and improve the way my students learn.  We had our differences, sometime he did not work as well as I thought he should but eventually I learnt that he just did things a little bit differently to the other guy I worked with.  In the end he was my go to guy, the one I went to with almost all my idea.  I guess that made some people uncomfortable, it was different, it was a change.  But I loved every minute of it.

Today I say goodbye to my Chromebook,  I have to give him back.  A change in class level has meant he is no longer mine.

In all seriousness though the challenge to go to GAFE was set at the end of 2012.  We had a year to trial it and see how it worked.  My team and I were expected to dabble and play around.  To see what we might be able to achieve.  

We did the right things, went to see high performing schools using GAFE, we were signed up for Hapara.  But we refused to dabble, we took a risk… go all in.  This change in mindshift was totally empowering.  We were going to make mistakes, we were going to get it wrong at times, we were going to have to deal with the naysayers.  

But we did it anyway,  we did it without enough devices, we did it with devices that didn't work as well as they should.  But we adapted, we made it work.

The journey was amazing.  We knew the pedagogical shifts we wanted to make; to be more collaborative and more creative.  We wanted to scaffold our students so that they could see the kinds of things that could be created.  S we did things differently, we made out writing books look like Google Docs with a comments margin, we made graphic organisers that the students could use online and on paper, we showed student how to layer when making posters on paper and explained how it was the same in Slides.  

We worked out how to use GAFE tools for their strengths,  Docs for ongoing growing documents with specific feedback, Slides if you wanted to make things pretty, Sheets for handling and filtering data.  

Our students loved it, feedback that wasn't gone when they turned a page, that for whatever reason they seemed to care about.  The ability to create documents they were proud of.  Those students who had poor presentation skills were no longer disadvantaged.  Suddenly our Dyslexic and struggling writers had access to speech to text, another barrier down.  The world was opened up to us.  

In short the year was an amazing first step.  

Now I have to adapt.  GAFE is probably less of a focus where I am now.  It will be about iPads.  So I am looking forward to learning about app smashing, about finding new ways to motivate younger students to develop the mindset of collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and effective communication.  To see their young minds expand to see the possibilities that their generation has.  My current school reminds me of the first school I worked at.  We had a brilliant vision back there that is so applicable; Rural School, Global Outlook.

We are not limited anymore by our geological location.  We can travel through time and space in our classrooms and that is one of the most exciting things about being in education today.  So get out there, be brave, jump all in to whatever you see as being important.  Remember - Whatever is Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well!

I hope you enjoyed this Blog post, it felt a bit rushed as it is part of the #28dayofwriting challenge where you write for 28 minutes every day for the month of February.  Thank you for taking time to read this post and if you are taking part in #28dayofwriting, good luck and I look forward to seeing your posts.