Two things come to mind when I think about how I’ve built my tech skills successfully in the past: get a buddy and jump into the deep end.
Honestly, I don’t get a buddy as often as I should. I have to say that they’re much better for morale, are great to bounce ideas off of, and can help with their expertise when you’re stuck. So though I don’t buddy up as often as I should, I’m hoping to get a buddy for my exploration with Twitter (and other social media).
My New Media 11 class is engaged in a great inquiry about data, privacy, and social media and I’ve upped the ante by requiring them to have a specific target audience, 45 members of whom must give them feedback on their message. You should have seen their faces when they realized they couldn’t just slap it together for the unimportant audience of Ms Bell. After a few minutes, they started to putting together ideas and got into it. I know that having students reach authentic audiences helps them to improve the quality of their work. I think I had never really required it to happen before, certainly not in such a large audience. Now I am faced with the challenge of how do I ethically and safely get them to reach these authentic audiences without casting them to the trolls of social media. Buddy time! My two thoughts here are to buddy up with our district technology person. She likely has some great ideas, and hopefully a lot of knowledge about what our district’s parameters and policies are about using these kinds of platforms. I’m also hoping to buddy up with a local journalist who does a lot of his work on Twitter and has faced some pretty horrible trolls. Also, any of you lovely people reading this blog, please give me your ideas!
Jumping in to the deep end. This is where I seem to spend a lot of learning time. You think I’d learn by now. Planning would be good, but I seem to be far more inclined to fly by the seat of my pants. Thankfully, I’ve learned to swim. Actually, I think I like the challenge. For instance, we’ve decided to change how chromebooks, the library computers & tables, and labs get booked, but we couldn’t find a utility that really worked with school schedules. The computer teacher at another school made up this amazing Google Spreadsheet, and I took on the task of changing it to fit our school – I had no real idea of what I was getting myself into!
I’ve learned far more about spreadsheets than I had ever hoped to learn! But I’m pretty proud of my efforts to sort out this puzzle. Like all good inquiries in life, I figured it out because it was something I really wanted to learn. It took quite a while last year, and then we changed how we’re organizing the chromebooks again, so more tinkering. However, it’s the continual tinkering and using what I learned by jumping into the deep end that has helped me remember how to manipulate and adapt this spreadsheet. I could not have created it, and my hat is eternally off to the teacher who shared this with us! Constantly it reminds me that I have to practice what I’ve learned, or I’ll forget it as fast as I forget the names of my students from last semester.
Of course, there’s one final step to keeping and honing tech skills: become someone else’s buddy. There’s no point watching someone else jump into the deepend (unless they want to), when I can share what I’ve learned. Pay It Forward. What a great story and an excellent idea! I always find that by sharing ideas, mine get stretched into different directions and that makes them far richer.
I love the idea of the authentic audience! I have been trying to think of ways to do this, but so far the only way I have is things like students responding to other student blogs. I want them to have a bigger audience than just themselves, but, like you, I also worry about the wrong people getting access to their posts etc. One idea I had had was exchanging with another teacher in another district (preferably in another city) so students would be responsible for responding to students they don’t know. I’ve been also thinking about this for my creative writing classes-how can I get their work out to a larger audience, using the wonderful resource we have via the interweb?
We have a very very “concerned” admin on issues like this and often have to be more careful than I personally feel we need to, but I still want to find more ways to have an authentic audience. Please share what you find along the way! Also, who did you specify as their target audience and how are you going to ensure they get 45 comments? That is a lot!
I love the idea of using a teacher in another district. That definitely adds some safety to the part with publishing. I have the same quandry with my creative writing class. There are some good fan fiction sites that I’d like to explore with my students. Just not sure how far I should expect them to go. Just as readers? Try posting?
As for 45 comments, I really just pulled the number out of a hat. I’ve taught psychology before and had the student create their own experiments and studies, and I find that fewer than 30 participants leads to results that don’t mean much – both for the study and to the students doing the work. It’s just another assignment. I thought that 45 means they would have to get out to several classes (if that’s how they’re disseminating information), and they would have enough people give them meaningful feedback that they would have a real idea of the effectiveness of their message. If they have far fewer respondants, then they need to alter their style or content which I think makes the whole inquiry more realistic to life after high school.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about target audiences and really thinking about who their specific audience is. Most of them are aimed at teenagers, so our school will easily provide the neccessary audience. One student’s target audience is seniors so we’ve been brainstorming how she can reach them. I think that all of this will really help create important reflections on the whole inquiry.
Your authentic audience is a worthwhile endeavour. Good for you for making their work so meaningful. I believe Laura was on to something with exchanging with another teacher in another district, similar to how Pen pal letters used to work in the past. I also wonder if you put this idea out to LM-Net http://www.lm-net.info/ you would be able to find teachers around the world working on similar projects.
Well done, engaging post on your experiences, connections, successes and opportunities to be a self directed learning so far. Buddies are imminently important, and one thing I’ve learned over the years, is that no matter how much I think I know, there will always be someone who knows a little more, and how they can help me, save me time, or support my growth. Its a great model and I am glad to see you finish up with a reminder to “pay it forward”. Great discussion of your class and their explorations with connections and relationship building with their audience and community. Very good reflection!