Change bLog

I have been thinking recently about the role of teacher and learner, and how the balance sometimes changes. This trail of thought has been mainly sparked by two incidents.

We have a technician who works in our school twice a week. To call him a technician is a bit of an understatement really as he is a trained teacher who now mainly does freelance work for some of the major Apple magazines, websites and podcasts. He knows much, much more about technology than I do and I am always learning from him. However, last week, I taught him something (about using barcode scanners to transfer information to mobile phones, very interesting!) So, although he knows more about ICT than I do, he doesn’t know everything. He can still learn from people who know less than him.

In a school assembly a few weeks ago, a piece of music was played. I usually pride myself on my music knowledge and was most distressed that I couldn’t name this 1960s Motown classic. Then, within seconds of the song being played, one of our children put up his hand and answered the track name and artist. The child is a student at the special school that I work in and can’t write much or do addition past 8. However, his music knowledge is excellent, and he often suggests music he thinks I should listen to. If his taste in music wasn’t so biased towards late ’80s euro-soft-rock I would take more notice.

We don’t always learn in a way which is easy to measure. We may know a lot about something, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t gaps in our knowledge that somebody who knows less that us can fill in.

See if you can pick something up from a student this week, and maybe teach the subject leader something too. If you’ve already broken up for the holidays, can you remember learning something when you didn’t expect to learn anything?

I have been teaching for nearly a year now and have been inspired by the other teachers I have encounter on blogs, conferences and podcasts. I’ve tried to use some of the great ideas in my teaching in a school for children with special educational needs, but I have encountered a big problem – the login screen.

We have tried to use Google Apps, email, flickr, etc. However, they all require a login, for obvious reasons. This proves to be very difficult for nearly all of the students I teach. Many of them struggle to spell, with many not even registering on standardised tests. Whilst they can read a bit, use the computers better than some of the staff and create all kinds of media, when it comes to logging in, they just can’t enter the text accurately enough. As many of the children I teach have emotional and behavioural problems, two negative responses from a website can have a major effect on their behaviour for a good deal of time. Once they have logged into something like Google Docs, they can spell well enough to produce some creative and readable work, but a login screen is obviously unforgiving. Even giving the children their login details to copy into the computer isn’t enough for them to get it right.

Whilst I would love my students to be part of the exciting possibilities presented by the web, i’m not sure there’s a practical way to involved them. Any ideas?

Common Craft is a husband and wife team creating videos that explain things ‘in plain English’. They provide both free low-resolution embeddable and licensed high-resolution videos for use in school, places of work, blogs. Their Twitter in Plain English video is available from the Twitter home page. They have also produced Social Media in Plain English video. Whilst I love their simple visual approach, I feel like this video is less ‘plain English’ and more ‘bizarre analogy’. I still like it though and it probably does it’s job.

On a recent visit to Estonia, I was talking to someone about myself, what I did for a living, etc. I mentioned Finnish schools as being highly regarded. She immediately scoffed at the comment. ‘School is really bad in Finland’, she said in perfect English. ‘The teachers can’t say anything about the children’s behaviour, the children are even allowed to chew gum! And, the teachers have to turn lessons into games and make them fun, otherwise the children don’t learn.’ I didn’t really know what to say in return, I like games!

*EDIT* – I’m not suggesting that this is the view of all Estonians!