Learning From the Kids

So, like many other folks these days, I've been getting excited about the possiblities of UStream, but I also have been wondering about how we might leverage this in the classroom in ways that really take advantage of this twin notions of audience and interaction. As a result, what you see is SLA's first foray into interactive broadcasting... I stopped by one of our tech electives to show them the tool (and we were joined by another class after a few minutes), and I sent out a Twitter message to my network, and suddenly an interactive broadcast was born. I did forget to start recording for the first ten minutes, so this stream joins the conversation mid-talk.



There are some real flaws with the broadcast, mostly that the mic was next to me, and I'm talking in "teacher voice," so I'm rather overpowering on the video compared to the kids' voices, I need to turn off the Skype noises, because they are distracting, and I think we need a wireless mic so that the kids can be heard better... (and I think IRC is getting blocked by the school district, which makes using UStreams chat session impossible) but given that it was a spur of the moment thing, it's really an interesting thing to listen to.

Now, one, there's the really cool, "Hey, our kids can carry on a conversation with people from all over the world!" factor, but more than that, we focused this conversation on school reform, and our kids had incredibly powerful things to say about how they see SLA and how it's different for them.

One of the things that really does come through is that, for our kids, the technology comes second. They love the laptops, and they get how it helps them learn, but first, it's about the teachers and the projects and the ethos of the school and about the unified way in which we learn. As Leah says, "We don't come to school for a laptop, we come here because of the way we learn."

They see it, they get it, and they believe in it. There are those folks out there who think that teenagers cannot be powerfully meta-cognitive, that they won't take the time to think about the way they learn best. I'd like to sit anyone who thinks that way down for an hour with SLA kids. I'd love anyone who thinks that test-driven learning is the way to go to listen to Kiana speak about why projects are harder -- because they require students to push their own learning, as opposed to just taking someone else's test.

As we think about 21st Century tools and reforming education, we need to remember that we use the tools to leverage the relationships, to extend the relationships, to push a progressive, inquiry-driven, understanding-driven, project-based way of teaching and learning, but without the pedagogy, the tools are nowhere near as powerful.

If you don't believe me, listen to the kids. They say it better than I ever will.