When you go into a photographic darkroom, there is change. Not just from the bright light of day into that rarified red glow, but a change of attitude. You go ‘there’ to work, to develop, to create… Don’t believe me? Stand with a group of year 10s in a photographic darkroom pending the slow fading to existence of their pinholed photos and tell me there isn’t an air of expectation. There is an almost mystical process occurring as the clear liquid sloshes over a slowly developing image. It comes with a buzz of creativity and a general enhancement of all faculties. So, do we need this mental and spatial transformation in order to be creative and focussed? There is no doubt that it can help. We all keep old junky clothes for when we work in the garden (or when renovating the house). It is not just a practical thing; it is a mental changing too. When you put on the old clothes, you are prepared to work. Try weeding in a full suit one day as see if you are not disinclined to pull out that dandelion. Does this have impact when the home PC is used for games? In my place there is a PC dedicated to word processing, project work, assignments and the like; there is another one for games. Technically, they are configured differently but mentally they have a different ‘aura’. The expectation of my children when they approach one or the other (sadly one more than the other) is different. So how do you encourage your daughters to use the computing power to their scholastic advantage? If you can’t have two PCs in two different places, then make the one you have behave as if it were two by separating ‘them’ temporally. Designate it to be an educational machine during the hours of, say 4pm to 6pm. Then make it a general-purpose machine for email, games, chat, surfing, etc., for other hours. This does not stop you using it for anything any time, but is a good reason or basis to encourage educational computing skills and also utilise the printing, word-processing and graphics capabilities of your technology. If the computer is seen as an educational resource between certain hours, going there at that time will carry an expectation of work. Going there knowing it is always a machine for games and chat takes the edge off the concentration. See if the delineation works for you.
General ramblings
Chicken or egg
Each year pre-service teachers are thrust in the world of education. Most were taught by ‘old’ teachers. They will likely as not have a prac session with an old’ hand. ‘They are rarely prepared to face the Millennial world of students, they have barely enough skills to use a word processor for assignments or their iPods to drown out a droning lecture on Piagetian stages. This is not a good thing.
Syllabus documents demand masses of content and ‘traditional’ assessment techniques. Hooray that pre-service teachers are able to cope with exactly these requirements. Hmmm, sensing a link here?
Back to those Millennial students… Old tired syllabus documents, old tired teaching methods, crammed courses, crammed teacher days, understaffed ICT support departments (if any at all) — all sounds too familiar.
Do the ‘eggs’ – our potentially education changing new-teachers bring the IT revolution that’s waaaay to long overdue? Or, are they only going to be able to make change when the syllabus documents allow such change? Will the writers of the syllabus documents make the changes or are they ‘chicken’?
I enjoy watching the ‘revolutionary fight’ that is conducted, mostly by the participants of the blogosphere and twitter-sphere and the like, I think it’s a necessary step to making any significant change, particularly against so large and well established an entity as education.
Educational change and classroom practice change isn’t determined by money or equipment (or lack of it) it only happens through the power of assumption. Assume the students have the ability and capacity to embrace and support and gain from change, assume that the changes you make no matter how small are effective and cumulative, assume that the results however few and far between are being noticed and appreciated. Everything we need is in place now. Assume it will all come good in the end.
It will.
The Google toilet roll
Imagine you’ve asked a librarian (they do still exist) in bold voice, I’d like to know about {insert topic of choice} – She ducks behind the counter pops back up holding a toilet roll – or equivalent lengthy sheet of paper – absolutely full of entries. They are the places on any page on any book anywhere that the topic of you choice appears. Useless right? What we’d really expect is some librarian sense to cut in there and she’d actually give you a whole book or whole chapter not only on the topic of your choice but in pertinent form to you. Thinking primary school level or PhD here.
But! this toilet roll approach is exactly what Google gives you. Millions of entries with no sense of context and rarely any likely hood of educational value or connection to the assignment or project you’ve set or are taking. So why do we do that? Probably because Google forgot to put “directory” on the front page. It’s hidden away in the depths of the labs section. That’s where all the cool things are in case you haven’t seen it.
Don’t let students search in the main page of Google unless they have really learned good searching techniques. The Directory search is much more forgiving, much more educationally valuable and likely to get them their homework done in half the time and with much better results.
Remember this is good for you to set better assignments and projects too.
Changes afoot
Changes happening this week. I’m soon to be changing from one school to another. Might turn out to be from the frying pan into the fire. Having trouble finding a suitable replacement. The proces has begun.