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October 16, 2009
Internet in the classroom
Talmud Torah technology initiative is underway.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
In the global economy, "The role of school has to change. It's no longer sufficient to only converse within the walls of your classroom. We need to expand the boundaries to prepare children for this new economy."
This was the main message of a recent workshop given at Vancouver Talmud Torah (VTT) by Alan November, an expert in education technology. November has written Empowering Students with Technology and Web Literacy for Educators. He was speaking to a group of educators in the Jewish community, who spent the morning at VTT learning about how the Internet works and how technology can be better used in schools. Based in Massachusetts, he was brought to Vancouver with the help of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and was part of an ongoing technology initiative at VTT.
"We decided that we needed to bring about technological change in our school and that didn't mean necessarily the changing of computers, it meant the way we think about technology," VTT principal Cathy Lowenstein told the Independent.
Phase I was the media lab, which began about three years ago, explained Jennifer Shecter-Balin, VTT director of communications. "We have to give credit to the board president at the time, Ari Shiff, who really was instrumental in getting chief stakeholders and donors on board. We had a computer lab with very antiquated Mac computers and, through his efforts and the efforts of many, many volunteers, we were able to create a multi-media lab with state-of-art Apple computers."
In addition to the lab, there are one or two computers in every classroom. But Lowenstein cautioned that bringing the larger world into the classroom "is an enormous task and not something that can be done in a month or two months because we realized also that we didn't have the infrastructure to support all of this. We're now working on our visioning piece to see what we're going to need to have in the next few years to support a tech integration initiative."
One part of this vision is a leadership cohort of teachers. Rabbi Matthew Bellas, who teaches grades 6 and 7 primarily, is part of the VTT tech cohort, which also includes teachers Leif Branson, Nicole Chatz, Sandi Evans, Tiki Goldenberg, Myra Michaelson, Pat White and Anna Zeldis.
Bellas – who creates all his own teaching materials – went through his wiki for his Grade 6 class. "For each of the packets, I create pdfs and put them on the web, so that kids don't have to drag papers back and forth from home. They can print out a sheet at home if there are things that they need to be working on."
According to Bellas, wikis are basically "interactive webpages, so I can create a home space where all my learning for a particular subject, or all my subjects for a specific grade, where all of that is housed and then, over the course of the year, we use it for all kinds of different things."
Bellas said, "The thing that I love, whether it's a discussion thread or the Internet, and when I talked at parent night about it, I said, it doesn't matter which homeroom your kid was placed in because this is the grade's wiki, so if you're in 6A and your best friend's in 6B, there are no walls to the classroom anymore. The Internet is the walless classroom, so ... I can have kids in the entire grade interacting with one another on the subject that we talked about and worked on in our 40 minutes of class. My periods aren't 40 minutes anymore – my periods are until they go to bed, or until the assignment is due. They can e-mail me questions. It breaks down all of the traditional barriers to what traditionally has been called schooling or education or whatever you want to call it: the barriers are gone."
There are still protective barriers, however. Bellas said, "because in Grade 6, the kids are 11 years old and in Grade 7, the kids are 12 years old and there are concerns about what's going on in the outside world and safety and security, kids protecting their identities, etc., my wikis are completely private. Only people that I invite or who ask me for permission to be able to view it have the freedom to be able to see what's going on and to be able to participate."
Bellas said that one of his motivations for participating in the tech cohort was "to find ways to make the study of text more active, more participatory, more engaging, so that it wasn't just the teacher standing in front of the class and teaching a text to the kids.... You learn better when you're actively engaged and you're actually doing, and technology helps to be able to facilitate more active participation and more doing."
And it's not just the children who are learning, he said.
"I think probably the most important characteristic to this whole process of integrating tech into teaching and into learning is not being afraid to take risks and not being afraid to experiment and not being afraid to mess it up the first time, or to fail.... Over the summer, I said, 'OK, I will jump and I'll try' and, so far, it's inspiring for me because I get to also learn as I teach."
Bellas encourages students to bring their laptops to class and in one instance, a student connected with a fellow student who was sick at home. "We took the laptop up to the board and we took a picture of the dry-erase board so that he could have an image of the notes in class," explained Bellas. "It didn't go as far as him being able to raise his hand and ask a question, although he could have if the student who had him on his screen would have said, 'So-and-so's got a question.' But he was there and he stuck around for the whole 40 minutes."
While a positive experience, Shecter-Balin noted that this classroom experience exposed some of the challenges ahead for VTT. Having the student join the class via computer "took 60 percent of the school's bandwith," she said, "so suddenly we have all these other teachers who are going onto YouTube, or I'm in my office, suddenly we cannot download or upload as quickly as we want to.... So we need to get the proper infrastructure."
Lowenstein added, "There are so many different ways to use technology in the classroom. It's absolutely endless. It runs through every part of curriculum: language, arts, science, math."
In his Sept. 30 workshop, November said this transition to an Internet culture engenders the need to teach children how to access information "with a discipline and a rigor." The second necessity, he said, "is fantastic global communications skills, that you can work with people all over the world." Finally, kids need to learn "to be self-directed ... if you think about it, if you need a boss to tell you what to do, the organization has to hire somebody to manage you. So people who are self-directed and have their own internal boss are much cheaper than people who need a boss to tell them what to do."
As for the school environment in particular, November said, "Research in the United States indicates that something like 82 percent of our children use the Internet as their first sources for homework. The books could be right next to them, but they've got a computer at home and they're on the web and they're looking for content to hand in."
This means that kids – and adults – need to approach the Internet as critical thinkers, said November.
"I did not find one kid who knew how Google worked," said November about his extensive work with students. "Not one. But you know what? They didn't know they didn't know ... you should have seen these kids' faces, how confident they were. They were insulted I even asked them, 'Do you know how Google works?' They were insulted, but I knew they didn't know. You understand what I'm saying? If you think you know, and you don't know, I can manipulate you even faster than if you know you don't know."
The many positive aspects of the Internet – and the fact that it's not going to disappear – make knowledge of how it works crucial and November gave educators at the VTT workshop several useful tools on how to determine who owns a website, how to find reputable sources, etc. He also showed teachers some ideas for school projects and how to engage children more in the educational process. For example, he showed some math tutorials created by a young girl that are on the Internet and how many visits the site has gotten.
"But here's the issue, and I'll play hardball," said November. "The issue is, this is typically the job of a teacher to provide content that helps children learn, not the children helping children learn. The real issue is not technology – I can teach you this in 20 minutes – the issue is a shift of control. Are you willing to empower children to take more responsibility for contributing to class?"
For more information, visit novemberlearning.com/resources.
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