Kelli McGraw

Before some wonderful stories about engagement and excellence, my own confession? I wasn’t a successful English student. I was placed in an English class in Year 7, near the bottom, and pretty much stayed in that same level until year 12. I didn’t add colourful borders or neat headings to assessment tasks, or keep to words limits or get the answer that was in the head of the teacher. I couldn’t spot the difference between a simile and a metaphor. From school I remember a grey six foot barbed wire fence.

I’ve had the same conversations with colleagues, I’ve been hassled and bullied about embracing technology. I continue to promote its place within and with (out) the four walls of a classroom. Learning just doesn’t occur in a classroom, or with a single person holding the knowledge.

Now I’ve been told to play nice. We run moodle at our school, late last year I checked students last logins. Most are hours before hand, during class. One student was logged on, 9pm.
It is a boy who was visiting family in India, I checked the time difference. It was the middle of the day. He was logged onto moodle, onto our (notice the use of collective pronoun?) course, a course called Go Troppo. The major work was a short film. He made his, using his government provided laptop, while in India. He did well in NAPLAN, he did well in the other, across the year sumative assessment tasks. But he went beyond those levels of success that adults created for him.

How can we get like minded people together, great readers, critical thinkers? I work in a school with two ‘advanced’ English classes, how can we make those students feel as if they are not nerds, nor geeks? How can we hook those students up with other students who love English? I am currently working with Bianca from Davidson High School, we work together on http://lhsenglishadvanced.edublogs.org/ have a look at the comments, at the interaction between students, as directed by the students. Sure, most of these students went well in the school certificate exam, most had been sheltered in ‘a’ stream classes. Now the world is just a little bit wider for them.

Should we say sorry for adding to what we already do? I don’t need to promote the values of ‘traditional’ European teaching. We know they work, we know that they have served a particular type of student since the first laws were passed to ensure universal education. But:
We learn in groups, we learn as individuals, we learn by breaking the rules, we learn by watching… sometimes we learn from younger people as much as we learn from elders, sometimes we learn by listening to a teacher out the front of the room. More often than not, our students want to learn, maybe to pass the next test, maybe just to understand. It is harder to make sure we too, as the ‘teacher’ also want to learn. Just maybe we will gain some understanding of the people we sit in class with.

For me technology is a tool for engagement, cooperative learning and promoting distributive expertise. Technology is a vital part of life. it is a vital part of the lives of young people. Using technology helps to bridge the ever widening chasm between learning at home and learning at school. In our classroom whatever we do we use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is a pen and paper but often it’s some form of digital technology. In our classroom technology is a tool to help us to become better thinkers, sharers, readers, writers and creators. I have worked in schools with limited access to technology and in schools where they have every new technological gadget imaginable. In both cases it is the teachers’ attitudes to learning that determined whether the technology was used effectively, if at all.

In my experience the teachers who are willing to explore new technologies, fail often and joyously, ask for help from students, ‘stuff up’ and have more than one backup plan are the teachers who teach using co-constructivist approaches. Those who use other approaches are often not so keen to use technology in their classrooms. One of the reasons for this may be that technology breaks down hierarchies, destroys traditional power structures and is ultimately about genuinely learning in groups in which nobody can hide and this can be scary for teachers because you can’t be in control in the way you are used to. In our classroom the Kellis of this world find it much harder to switch off and in fact don’t want to because they love using technology to think and be engaged.

We try to operate an inquiry centred classroom. We turn often quite traditionally framed units of work into inquiries; into things that matter to us as students and teacher. Examples include ‘How do we construct ourselves for public consumption?’ (was a Biography unit) or ‘How and why do we need to create?’ (was a Narrative unit). Within these units we complete culminating projects which involve the use of technology to analyse, evaluate and synthesis what we have learned into some sort of product that we can share. That may be a short move, an essay, a PowerPoint museum, a website, an online quiz, a narrative, a digital poem, a song, a podcast, a vodcast…We also use technology to analyse and evaluate our process of learning. This could take the form of a video diary, series of podcasts or a blog. Often we make mistakes and fall flat on our faces but we learn. And we always have a back up plan (or two) because that’s what you need to do in real life- ‘expect the unexpected’.

Young people use these technologies at home. To me, it is common sense, that we use their experience with these technologies in the classroom to excite them about the subject of English and improve their higher order thinking skills. It is much more challenging (and exciting) to create a Facebook profile for William Shakespeare than write a one page biography. It is much more engaging to learn about narrative perspective by using your prior knowledge as an avid player of video games. And most importantly such learning experiences validate your prior knowledge and have stickability!

Our golden rules in regards to technology in the classroom are ask questions, experiment a lot, think deeply, share often and fail joyously.