Do we deliver or facilitate learning?

Look at this article - http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/04/07/the-changing-role-of-instructors-moving-from-facilitation-to-constructive-partnerships.aspx

Is what we are teaching information? Or are we teaching how to learn and be "life-long" learners. Isn't it actually more challenging to facilitate learning than it is to merely deliver content? I would argue that it might be a step in the right direction if we can focus on teaching students how to effectively, ethically, authentically, creatively,.....access and use information that is out there than it is to teach course content. The flip side of it is that with technology there is access to so much information that teachers will always be relevant to help students learn to filter and validate what is there. I think with technology our jobs are becoming more critical and essential to the success of the learner but it will take a paradigm shift to understand how our new roles will shape up!

I'd like to hear your comments on this article and this shift in our role as educators.

STEM

PODetc is currently conducting a STEM class and it always provides time for me to reflect on my own practice. I started as a science teacher and continue in the classroom after some 20 years although I have mixed some administrative jobs in there at different times. Most of the participants in our PODetc Focus on STEM class are science educators, but we generally come to the same consensus that STEM is not just about science and math and technology!

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math but what it really is about is focusing on critical thinking and problem solving skills in an authentic environment. Regardless of whether a student will pursue a career in one or more of these areas, you cannot live in our 21st century world without interacting with one or more of these areas. This course gives us a chance to look at ways we can use technology to really get our kids engaged in the learning process and to be students ourselves in learning how to use these tools. Right now we are trying some collaborative concept mapping using a site called Bubbl.us. This is one of many good concept mapping tools available - others include:

• Mindmeister
• CMAP

I find in my work with high school seniors that sometimes returning to a more organic note-taking and organizing tool as mind-mapping is more effective than the linear note systems we start to expect as students get older. The advantage of these Web 2.0 tools is that they are interactive!

We are also playing with the Intel thinking tools. Intel has some incredible resources for teachers above and beyond some great interactive sites. Throughout the course, the emphasis is on sharing resources and dialoguing about how we successfully promote some of these skills within our already crowded curricula. Again, I find that my interactions with the PODetc students teach me as much as I hope they learn!

Research and Information Skills

"When I teach evaluating websites, I usually have students select one of five pre-selected websites and fill out a worksheet to determine if the website is valid. The worksheet really just helps students identify certain things about the website and then they give their opinion. It is fairly basic and there is a definite right or wrong answer. However, I would like to do something more challenging as a culminating exercise for this lesson. The website on GolfCross has been suggested to use in evaluating websites but there is conflicting information as to whether this is a bogus site or valid. One site rates this as one of the top bogus sites, , and a travel site on Mt. Cook New Zealand, lists it as an activity to enjoy along with 5 other golf courses. My research question, therefore, is to evaluate the website GolfCross to determine if this is a real site and real sport or a spoof. The Bloom’s taxonomy level would be analysis. Victoria suggested using Intel’s Showing Evidence. The Showing Evidence Tool helps students learn how to construct well-reasoned arguments and prove their case with credible evidence. The tool provides a visual framework to make claims, identify evidence, evaluate the quality of that evidence, explain how the evidence supports or weakens claims, and reach conclusions based on the evidence. This thinking tool supports activities where students debate differences, make and defend decisions, and analyze conflicting information . I would divide the class into groups. Each group would create their own researched evidence and come to their own conclusion. The groups would then compare their conclusions." S. Krueger, student PODetc Introduction to Instructional Technology.

In a recent PODetc course, a student posted this description of her lesson plan for research. What struck me about it was the clear application of analysis, evaluation, and discrimination in filtering information. This is a critical skill we need to foster in our students as we have access to exponentially more information every day!!! The ISTE NETS Students #3 is specific to "Research and Information Fluency" - with the goal that "Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information."

There are a number of tools on the Internet that can help you, including the Intel thinking tools mentioned above. Whatever tools or strategies you provide, it is important to remember that our students who are born to a world that is flush with information on any topic imaginable are not necessarily good at discriminating validity. It is our role as educators to teach students to use their critical thinking skills to filter this onslaught of information and to focus their research on specifics applicable to a specific question.

How do you develop those skills in your students - comment and let us know!

See our January Newsletter to find out how we can help in your professional development in the New Year!

PODetc is off to a great start in the New Year. For our Winter term we are offering our full range of courses beginning next week with Introduction to Instructional Technology in the Classroom. In this highly interactive course, participants will begin to explore tools and technologies that can enhance their own classrooms. In February, we will offer Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom and Technology Literacy 101: Foundations in Collaborative Tools. April and June offer even more options.

Visit our site to see how we can help you learn!!!!

Learning continues

This month I conducted a new class in PODetc entitled "Focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math): Instructional Technology Strategies for Science and Math." I also decided to participate as a student in three other PODetc courses occurring concurrently but taught by other teachers. I also am a full time teacher and department chair in science so how I survived is a minor miracle!!! But that is not what I want to address here. The courses I participated in were:

• Survey of Emerging Technologies taught by Theresa Stanley
• Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom taught by Connie Jaeger
• Technology Literacy 102: Building Knowledge Management Systems taught by PODetc founder and CEO, Tammy Stephens

First, I have to say that I am lucky to be working with such knowledgeable and versatile instructors. They make the courses interactive and meaningful for all students coming in at all levels and experiences. It was really a great opportunity for me to participate in the discussions and activities both with the other students and with the instructors where my role this time was a student.

While I have of course reviewed all of our PODetc courses and have regularly lurked in the background to keep current with our offerings, participating as a student was a great learning experience. Among the four courses we built blogs, wikis, nings, delicious networks, diigo lists, interactive lesson plans, collaborative rubrics, Intel lessons emphasizing critical thinking, collaborative concept maps and more. Not only did we build them but we put them to work and found applications to each of jobs outside of the course. Instructors helped me stretch my use of these valuable tools and guided me in linking them together for ease of access and application. In our discussion groups we addressed the challenges of teaching students in this age of technology when our backgrounds, budgets, audiences, and resources span the gamut of possible combinations and complexities. We evaluated samples of each others work and each found growth and improvement through the feedback we received.

I cannot emphasize how valuable this month has been to me in terms of really fine-tuning and motivating my own skills as an educator!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to our fabulous instructor and students!!!

Learning in the 21st Century

In my current STEM course we are talking about "21st Century Skills" and STEM skills for our students. Recently we started a discussion forum on what those are and began to discuss "agility and adaptability." One student gave us a good reminder that brought back memories of some of my experiences over the last 20+ years of teaching. The post was as follows:

"This has to start with us as teachers. As a teacher I don't teach the same way every year. I am constantly trying new things and the students (most of them) enjoy trying something different. I think this is good to role model adaptability and the agility to switch how something is done when you see it is not working. Changing methods of teaching is good role modeling and will make the students more likely to open their minds to be more agile and adaptable.
Students need to be encouraged to step outside of their comfort zones. As teachers we meet annually and evaluate what, how and why we teach concepts and core curriculum to our students. Changes are made to include technology as it changes, update concepts and methods."

I clearly remember days as a young teacher when I was told not to dare try anything different than the other teachers as that would just upset everyone. I even got hired once for my innovative ideas and then told not to use them!!! At one district, I was told after an interview with the superintendent that he would love to hire me but I would raise the bar too high for the other teachers and they would not be comfortable with change. WOW - this is education????

As teachers we have to change to keep up and be willing to learn as we go more than perhaps any other career. It is incumbent upon us to look at our teaching on a daily basis to see what we can do better. Go to conferences on brain research or read the literature to see what we know about how children learn. This career can be so exciting and invigorating if we put the effort into making it so!!!

Classes still open for enrollment in December - visit http://podetc.com

• Introduction to Instructional Technology in the Classroom starting November 30
• Technology Literacy 101: Foundations in Collaborative Tools starting December 7
• Technology Literacy 103: Utilizing Social Networking Tools in a Leadership Capacity starting December 7

Introducing new STEM courses!!!

PODetc is pleased to announce our new course - Focus on STEM offering instructional strategies in math and science education. This course will introduce educators to the concept of teaching within a STEM framework. A critical step occurs in the first week as participants develop a working definition for STEM in the context of their own practice and collaboratively build a glossary of working terms. PODetc participants will work with their fellow educators to define and rank the top ten critical STEM skills as we examine research and literature on 21st century learning. In the second half of the course, participants will create a lab report or project template aligned with the critical STEM skills, a rubric to evaluate students in their attainment of STEM proficiencies, and a final unit project within Intel Thinking Tools that integrates STEM with critical thinking, evaluation, and creation of new knowledge.

STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math. Educators, legislators, and business leaders have long been concerned with the state of science and mathematics in our schools. In a comparison of international scores for 4th and 8th graders, results show that the American students are still lagging behind our major global competitors including Japan, China, Russia, and Singapore (TIMMS 2007). As these countries outcompete us in academic assessments, they are also outcompeting us in capturing the global markets particularly in the area of information management.

The purpose of STEM initiatives at the national, state, and local levels is to bring together the resources of government in support of improving our educational system, the private sector in making alliances to support authentic learning applicable to what is needed in the workforce, and educational institutions in collaborating on the best pedagogy and curricula to develop students who are prepared to meet the challenges of their futures. This course is applicable not only to the disciplines of science and math, but to all other disciplines as teachers continue to develop a 21st century approach through cross-curricular integration. In real world work and interactions, we don’t have clear cut divisions between disciplines. Rather learning through STEM gives students tools to develop creative and systemic problem solving, collaborative networks, leadership abilities, and long-term strategic outlooks.

With the nearly ubiquitous access we have to global resources of information, it is no longer adequate that we teach our students the content of science and math curricula. Peter Drucker (1999) predicted information management would be one of the key challenges of the 21st century (1999). For organizations to remain competitive in the information society, they must tap the potential of their knowledge reserves. Those reserves are people as Drucker explains, “The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity” (Drucker, 1999, p. 135). Only a decade into the 21st century and we may have already surpassed that challenge to move on to the next. Now we need not just knowledge workers, but individuals with the creative acuity to know how to use that knowledge for the next evolution of governments, society, economies, medicine, and business. A side effect of an over-focus on information management is that the facility in the transfer of information leads to the tendency to detach the concept of knowledge from the context of the knower (Fahey & Prusak, 1998). It is not enough to teach a set of content standards, our students need to understand how to use that content.

Engineering is the application of skills and contents to the solution of real world challenges. Tony Wagner (2008), author of The Global Achievement Gap, describes what he calls the seven survival skills for the 21st century. These are critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration across networks and leading by influence, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective oral and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, and curiosity and imagination. “Being a lifelong learner and knowing how to access and analyze information, which is growing exponentially and is constantly changing, is far more important than rote learning of specific academic content” (Wagner, 2008, p. 257). The STEM initiatives are designed to encourage educators to move beyond the curricula to find application of content so as to nurture the ability of students to look at problems systemically from the roots up and find each level of cause and effect in the development of creative solutions.

Focus on STEM introduces educators to a new perspective from which to develop their craft. PODetc students will use online tools to integrate and apply the components of STEM to their curricula. Course participants will develop a working definition of STEM as it applies to their own teaching. We will develop strategies to reflect society’s evolution from an agricultural to industrial to information age, in which the world of work has shifted to requirements of self-directed use of time, mental rather than physical energy, a demand for creativity and innovation, and a high degree of independence (Goldberg, 1999). Students need the opportunity to forge not just social networks, but problem solving networks to collaborate across borders in finding common solutions to global problems. Educators must work toward the goal of preparing tomorrow’s builders and recognize that the workforce must be multi-talented with a combination of technical skills, flexibility, continuous learning, teamwork capacity, and communication (McLagan, 2000). Development of evaluative inquiry encompassing shared learning processes, training in inquiry skills, collaboration, links between learning and performance, and valuing a diversity of perspectives supports the development of these critical skills (Preskill & Torres, 1999).


Drucker, P. F. (1999). Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1st ed.). New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc.

Fahey, L., & Prusak, L. (1998). The Eleven Deadliest Sins of Knowledge Management. California Management Review, 40(3), 265-276.

Goldberg, B. (1999). Overcoming high-tech anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

McLagan, P. A. (2000). Portfolio Thinking. Training & Development, 54(2), 44-51.

Preskill, H., & Torres, R. T. (1999). Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, 2007. http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_1.asp retrieved May 24, 2009

Wagner, T. (2008). The Global Achievement Gap. New York: Basic Books.