by Bora Zivkovic of Blog Around the Clock

You are quite an evangelist for the use of online tools in the classroom. You used to teach with a blackboard and chalk - how and when did you get to embrace the modern tools in education?

My main subject was History. It’s what I had studied in college. But I always taught about History from the perspective of technology, focusing in on the invention of the bow & arrow, agriculture, paper, the steam engine and explore how these technologies affected and changed our cultures. The first time I saw a Radio Shack Model I computer operate, I knew, at that moment, that this was one of those technologies that was going to change everything. Here was a machine that you operated by communicating with it. I was thunder-struck. I was seduced.

However, it was sometime later that I started to learn, and am continued to learn that it isn’t the fact that we have a machine that we can communicate that makes computers so important. It’s that they give us new ways of communicating with each other. This, I’ve learned as an educator — not as a technologist.

One of the important concepts you write about is the Flat Classroom. Can you, please, explain it to my readers?

It’s simple. According to a recent PEW Internet & American Life study, 64% of American teenagers have produced original digital content and published it to a global audience. How many of their teachers are published authors, artists, musicians, composers, or film makers? From the perspective of our children’s information experience, they are more literate than many of their teachers. Our classrooms are flat.

The central question that we should be asking today is, “How do we drive learning if we can no longer rely on gravity?” Where do we get the energy. It’s a sobering and threatening idea for most educators. However, I think that once we can get to the other side of this problem, we, teachers and learners, will be much happier. Here are just a few ideas:

* We need to redefine literacy to reflect today’s information landscape and not just teach it as skills, but to instill it as habit.
* We, as teachers, need to model learning, not just inflict it. We need to practice new literacy in front of our students.
* What students learn has become less important. The answers are all changing. It as important today to be able to invent answers to brand new questions. What’s become more important is how students are learning.
* We need to understand our students information experience and learn to harness the energy that comes from it, to replace the vanishing energy of gravity.

“Please turn off your cell-phones, i-Pods and other electronic devices, kids” - why is this sentence, spoken at the beginning of a class period, wrong? What should a teacher say instead?

This is wrong on so many levels. But principally, we have to recognize, accept, and respect our students out-side-the classroom information experiences. For the first time in history, we are preparing our children for a future we can not clearly describe. So much is changing and so fast. I think that there are clues in our students information experience that we can use to better prepare them for that future.

I recently read about six schools in New York City (where they’ve banned cell phones) that are giving cell phones to all of their students (2,500 of them), preloaded with 130 minutes of talk time. More minutes are added based on test scores, good behavior, and other activities. The teachers are starting to use text messaging to share homework assignments, remind them of upcoming tests, and other activities. What I’d love to see is text-messaging become a platform for doing homework assignment in collaboration.

I know that this may seem weird to some, but no less (NO LESS) weird than many of the applications we use every day would have seemed 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

What is your basic advice to teachers who are not themselves Internet-savvy, yet want to take a plunge and get their students to produce online content, be it blogs, podcasts or videos? How do you explain the pros and cons and the usual traps some teachers fall into?

Be a good teacher, and pay attention to your students information experiences. Your students can teach you a lot about these new tools, and what better way to model yourself as a lifelong learner.

Become 21st century literate. Once you’ve accomplished that, then you can teach yourself what ever you need to know. Most of the teachers who are doing extraordinary things in their classrooms didn’t learn it in a workshop. They learned it by engaging on online conversations with other innovative educators.

Original article at Blog Around the Clock and is licenced under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.

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