Technology Professional Day: Blended Learning

Today 8 teachers from our school are attending a full-day professional day on using technology in the classroom. Our topic is blended learning, the mixing of classroom instruction that continues the same conversations after hours online. We are ready to hear how we can use both channels of instruction most effectively.

Stay tuned! I'll post throughout the day.
Wow! What a day of learning! I wish all professional development was this good!
We previewed lots of teachnology: Haiku, chatzy, google docs, blogs, voice thread, jing, Ted conferences, protagonize, wikispaces, etc.--too much to digest. But we were always asking about student learning first, not technology first, and that seemed right. We learned about reverse learning--or flipping classtime with homework--so that introductory lessons happen at home, then applied use of that learning in critical thinking groups in class. We got a taste of so much that our heads are swimming.

At the end of the day, in the parking lot, one teacher was asking 'What should students learn?' This question had been asked before all the technology barage was unleashed, and it should guide us. Digital literacy is one more skill for us to include, but it seems a useful one, not to crowd out others, but to integrate. The effort to integrate takes prep time, which is overwhelming at first. But this feels like the future, like the path toward reinventing education. Stay tuned!

Education leads to Conformity

I am trying to amp up my seniors' critical thinking skills (and their ability to critique society and institutions) before sending them off to college. Last night, they read short articles by Foucault and Paolo Freire on education's tendency to demand conformity rather than individuality. In class today, they read a series of quotes about conformity in education, then wrote a paragraph for ten minutes, and then I had them discuss in a free-form way without much guidance or traffic control by the instructor. The conversations were interesting to me and to the students. Some blamed education for making them conform, others explored how students tend to conform to peer groups to fit in. Others accepted the conformity expectations so they could succeed in college.

Tonight they are to post to their blogs a response to the conversation. Here's an excerpt from the first blog response, which seems thoughtful:
There is a large tendency among poor teachers to let students deny responsibility instead of accept consequences for their actions. Those who teach with with the opposite goal in mind encourage individual growth. The idea that success is defined as earning a high-powered job is something that schools and society are also inserting into the goals of students. . . . So to give a person freedom by trusting them with the accountability of their own actions, causes them to conform to the expectations put on them by their society-imposed goal.