Today, my students asked me for a ‘summary’ of the conference and my answer was that, above all, after listening to many other teachers’ experiences at the conference I realized that SYA is in great shape in pedagogy and technology since we’re already doing amazing things in term of goals, subjects, contents, strategies, skills or new online tools, and we’ve been updating ourselves to new educational models (each one of us on his pace, of course). Is there still room for improvement of for exploring new things? Of course, always!
Bill Rankin (speaker and independent consultant focusing on the impact of emerging educational technologies) said that sometimes changes are just “not because we did badly or it’s not working but for progressing and adapting” (as for instance El Bulli or Noma did). And Jeremy Birk (Director of Innovation and Research at the United Nations International School (UNIS) in New York City, and the one who leads our workshop) said that ‘frequently it has to be a gap to change, and if that exists let’s see how blended learning can fix them’. Both of them, in their different speeches converged that when we decide to change for instance one activity that already works could be recommendable to be pretty sure that students are then learning new tools that they’re not learning in the other way.
Therefore, we have to be careful about new cool and shiny methods and adapt them once we think they’re making a difference for our subject and for our students. For instance, if you’re asking a paper by google drive instead of by paper, that’s just substitution. If you’re asking students to do this and adding collaboration or peer-to peer-review (for instance), then its modification and augmentation, and maybe is more worthy to change when this happens but, of course, that’s up to you.
For example, in my case, this year I’m planning to blend just one or two units that can be benefited from any type of blended learning, and have feedback from students about it. For people not very keen on technology or e-learning like me, it takes a lot to decide which concepts or contents are gaining more if blended, at what moment of the year, what materials or new tools are better to use, how to insert all of this in Canvas, etc. Now, I have the motivation to try it since I saw the positives and I feel more prepared to do it.
Blended learning has multiple definitions and nuances, thus I’ll just post Wikipedia definition as a reminder: “Blended learning is a formal education program that involves combining Internet and digital media with traditional classroom methods that require the physical presence of both a teacher and students, with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace”.
And, for sure, blended learning can have multiple pros and cons. Some pros I like are students can learn at their own pace at home, they get some experience using 21st century online tools, it allows more face-to-face with students at classes and promotes activities that benefit the most from direct interaction (project based learning, station rotation or flipped classroom, etc. appear as different ways of blended learning). Think for a second on how many times are students working together out of class helping each other to understand the content of a class, thus doing it during the class resolving doubts together can be a positive change.
Some cons like lack of IT knowledge or strong technological dependence are still an issue but, at least, we already have students bringing their own computers, and having a good internet access at school and at home (impossible to imagine just 5-6 years ago in our SYA site).
That said, it’s also crucial that teachers have:
- motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic)
- time (to be trained first and to create material later on)
- training (teachers will need training on using this method of instruction to make it effective as well as to be shown how to access, use the technology and what is expected of them).
Respect of technology, before the conference, I thought that it didn’t matter to use different LMS platforms like Canvas, Moodle or Google drive but now, I firmly do think that we should work with the same platform (Canvas in our case) to help students and make things clearer for them (and for us since we can help better each other). The most classes and teachers are using same technology (platform, tools, etc.) the quicker our students get used to it.
SYA is still being an amazing rara avis, a unique school where our students grow together each year, and looking for new ways of helping them to maximize their time, to learn new skills or just to find more appealing a unit, can be an attractive and motivating goal for some of us. Following some steps applied by other schools we couls review specific needs and purposes for SYA and our respective classes, set some common agreements to allow each teacher works at his pace, and start to explore these new possibilities feeling encouraged and supported by our institution.
