As educators, we’re online a lot. We enter our grades and attendance online, we e-mail parents, we store our lesson plans electronically and we sometimes check our personal e-mail accounts or online bank statements. In other words, teachers aren’t so different from most people: we’ve become used to using the computer for all kinds of work and personal tasks and we wonder how we ever lived before Google, Excel, and Farmville.
May means a lot of things. It’s the unofficial field trip month: just try reserving a school bus in May and you’ll find out just how many field trips occur in your district. May is test month. Students take state standardized tests and AP tests in May. They’re stressed until the middle of the month. May is senior month with another senior activity every other day: the senior banquet, the senior field trip, the senior graduation practice, the seniors’ last baseball game or track meet. It’s concert season, it’s the rainy season, and kids are squirrely. You’re packing up, tearing down, collecting, cataloging, figuring grades, and making sure your seniors are on track for passing your class.
May is also project month. We have just weeks left of school; no one wants to lecture students who squirm in their seats and watch the clock. Better to keep them engaged with the content and let them direct their own learning with a project.
Your students are spending a lot of their free time online. Think of the number of hours you estimate they spend online. Double it. The doubled number is probably closer to the truth.
According to the Norton Online Living Report 2009, parents believe their children spend 21 hours online. The reality is that students in twelve countries reported spending 39 hours online. Don’t tell me these kids don’t have time to finish their assignments or clean their rooms.
Despite many recent online learning inroads in schools, many professional educators and administrators remain hesitant, reluctant, and perhaps even highly resistant to try online learning and teaching with technology. However, with accelerating demand for online learning, significantly reduced budgets, and the emergence of hundreds of free or relatively inexpensive Web technologies, that resistance is coming to a sudden halt. While some may prefer to wait for massive instructor attrition, lightning to strike, or made-for-movie serendipitous events to occur to change this situation, I prefer more direct approaches. Listed below are 10 such ideas.
If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.
Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs.
Web-based instruction has transformed traditional notions of education so swiftly that there has been scant time to reflect on why this is occurring. In a June 8, 2009 front page story in my local paper, the Herald Times, Bruce Colston, Director of the Indiana University High School (IUHS), was interviewed about the growth and benefits of programs like the IUHS. Colston outlined ten distinct audiences for the courses at the IUHS. The audiences he mentioned and several additional ones are listed below.
Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event.
November of 2006 was a “Blues Fest,” according to the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa.
You might not remember, but that was the election when the democrats won back a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.
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