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Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Summer in a Digital Age
by Elizabeth Helfant

How many educators have espoused to create a legion of lifelong learners from the captive students in their classes? It is a noble and necessary goal for today’s educators but it does have ramifications for those so called lazy days of summer. Summer in this increasingly digital world is now a time for modeling lifelong learning unless that concept is more myth or cliché than fundamental belief. Summer is an educator’s time to polish up their learning skills. After all, wouldn’t it be ridiculously hypocritical to try to make our students lifelong learners but not abide by that concept ourselves. My summer learning plan includes a reading list, some curriculum revision that can only be accomplished if I learn some new things, and attendance at a few workshops and conferences.

Let’s start with the reading list. There is a reason for each of the selections I’ve made and in keeping with my increasing inability to work in linear fashion, I’ve been alternating between the books rather than taking a one after the other approach. My selections and initial thoughts are:

Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future

I like Gardner’s description of Five Types of Minds that each of us possess to some extent and prefer it to Pink’s left brain shift. The chemistry major in me whole heartedly recognizes that creativity is an important attribute but I believe it takes Gardner’s disciplined and synthesizing minds to facilitate the creative discovery while Pink’s creativity leaves too much to serendipitous chance for me.

John Medina’s Brain Rules

This book breaks down mechanisms used by the brain to learn into twelve easy to understand rules. John Bransford’s work is quoted. I won’t spoil the book but many of the rules provide strong arguments for the use of technology and the teaching of many of the 21^st century literacies. Rule 12 (Exploration) simply states that “We are powerful and natural explorers.” (unless someone or something denies us that capacity by forcing us to explore only that which does not impassion us.

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Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them

Kittle discusses how to teach writing with an essential component being writing with your students. I’m just starting this one but find it quite interesting and the technologist in me uses my synthesizing mind to apply the teaching of writing to the teaching of blogging.

Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage

I am reading this to help me become more knowledgeable on Lewis and Clark so that I am better able to help write curriculum for an interdisciplinary 11^th grade week of study currently titled Frontiers: Discovering the Undiscovered.(more on this later)

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us

The 10^th grade interdisciplinary week titled Collective Sustainability, Collective Responsibility, will focus on sustaining the planet in a flat, global world. The content will come directly from Weisman’s book.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse

The 9^th grade interdisciplinary week, Civilizations-Impacts and Implications, will examine how civilizations are defined, sustained, and destroyed in an effort to set the stage for the 9^th grade year’s essential question of “How does your civilization/culture impact and define you and your relationships in a global world?”

The workshops and conferences I’ve chosen to attend range include NECC, the Lausanne Laptop Institute, our MICDS speaker series (including our hosting of a terrific opportunity to learn how to connect globally with Flatclassroom experts Julie Lindsey and Vicki Davis) and the K12 Online Conference. The K12 online conference in actually not until the fall and if you are not familiar with it, it is a wonderful opportunity for educators to engage in a social, collaborative learning environment for two weeks. Currently there is a call for proposals and if you want to really engage in the collaborative and participatory learning process that technology affords, I recommend that you consider sharing with the greater community that is made smaller by free technology tools like Skype, Ustream, CoverItLive, ooVoo, dimdim, vyew, and FlashMeeting.

Lastly and most importantly, there is the learning that needs to take place to enhance curriculum and revise it in ways that are more efficient in delivery, more engaging to the audience for which it is intended, and more cognizant of formative and alternative assessment strategies. For all of us, there is something that can be learned to make curricular revision more successful. For me, it isn’t necessarily the technology tools that I need to learn about but rather the content that will be delivered with those tools. Hence, the last three books on my reading list; books selected to increase my knowledge of the topics that are being examined in each grade’s week long interdisciplinary unit. For others, summer learning should include a committment to exploring the technology tools that can make learning social, collaborative and networked, tools that make the classroom flatter. Since I know those tools well, I'm focsing on using them to learn more aout topics that will help me develop the interdisciplinary units.

The week long interdisciplinary units have been created in order to provide a vehicle by which to deliver tablet training and reinforce some basic research skills for the students in the 9^th and 10^th grades (We are going 1:1 in the fall with 9^th and 10^th grades.) These units are providing us an excellent opportunity to design curriculum using all the things we have learned from studying Marzano, Danielson, Wiggins and McTighe. While it won’t be offered this year, we are designing units for the 11^th and 12^th grade although they will not be taught until the fall of 09. Each unit will have some common characteristics or components.

• The interdisciplinary unit will not use the conventional schedule. It will require a specially designed schedule.
• Each unit will have a clear essential question.
• The unit will be graded using a detailed rubric. Students will self assess and a teacher, a librarian, and I will grade each student.
• Requirements will be fulfilled by submitting work to a reflective portfolio.
• Each unit will have a field trip component.
• Each unit will ask students to consider opposing viewpoints and will encourage consideration of ethical dilemmas.
• Activities will incorporate elements of Roger Taylor’s HOTS (higher order thinking skills) as explained in his framework for creating an interdisciplinary project.
• Each unit will reinforce research skills and will attempt to further each student’s understanding of 21^st century literacies. We’ll specifically refer to our own articulation of those skills.
• Each unit will use performance and project based assessment.
• Each student will have a differentiated learning experience. There will be opportunities for students to determine what they learn within an overarching theme.

For purposes of clarifing the concept, I’d like to discuss the 11^th grade unit as that’s the one we are most actively working on as I write this.

The 11^th grade unit, Frontiers: Discovering the Undiscovered, will look at frontiers using the journey of Lewis and Clark as a metaphor for discovering the unknown. The frontiers that they individually choose to explore could be in the realm of medical frontiers, political frontiers, or intensely personal frontiers. One day will be spent framing the topic and attending seminars run by a variety of speakers either face to face or via videoconferencing. We are looking at bringing is speakers doing creative, unique, or groundbreaking work in all of the disciplines and currently have a list of 27 potential speakers. Two of the five days will be spent in the field examining how Lewis and Clark navigated a new frontier as well as coming to understand existentialism as modeled by Emerson and Thoreau. Students will bike 20 miles of the KatyTrail and hike in local parks with historical significance. The biking and hiking will be interspersed with a Geocaching activity that will lead them to hidden caches that will ask them to examine a variety of perspectives or to make inferences about the relationships between Lewis and Clark’s frontier experience and an object that will suggest another kind of frontier experience; a vector (physics) challenge that will ask them to describe their environment in the language of mathematics; a GPS mediascapes tour that will point them to parts of the trail referenced in primary source journals from the actual trip; some historical re-enactment actors doing storytelling and Q&A sessions on the trails; and a nature scavenger hunt that will use iPod nature field guides to aide students on a quest to photograph several examples of  local Flora. We will have a “campus camping” experience that will provide musical entertainment and games of the time period, food that might have been served on the trail, and an outdoor viewing of a movie about that time period. Students will have some choices on what they create to document their completion of all the tasks they must complete on the trail. Day 4 and 5 of the unit will ask students to select a frontier they would like to know more about. Frontier is being loosely defined on this day and we will go with the Discovering the Undiscovered part of the title.

On the surface my summer learning and the unit that is evolving from my learning is not focused on technology, but that’s not because technology won’t be used.  It is because the technology is so blended that it is approaching boring. I agree with the following passage from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody:

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tools doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming. (p105)

Translation: Our students are engaging in social learning communities and it’s time for educators to join them. Our students are establishing routines of social collaboration, organization and informal learning without us. Educators must learn this terrain and must harness the concept of collaborative, social learning. They must be learners themselves for this to even be a possibility. Our students know that to learn this terrain requires actively engaging with the tools and participating in the learning process.

As an educator of today’s students, can you afford not to engage in the current landscape of learning equipped with the proper tools especially if the endeavor is to create dynamic learning opportunities and curriculum for your students?

Can you think of a better way to spend the summer than learning?

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.