Tag Archives: digital learning day

Digital Learning Day 2016

While it seems strange to limit digital learning to a day, designating a day to highlight the ways digital learning is being integrated into formal learning experiences is an important way to showcase that digital learning is here…and should be taking place in our schools to the advantage of all our students.

This year, the focus of Digital Learning Day is the issue of digital equity…or in the form of a hashtag, #techquity. A lot of people believe that digital equity is all about access to devices and internet…and of course, those are important issues, but #techquity is also about what students are asked to do and required to do with digital tools in their learning environments. All too often, digital tools become virtual replacements of low level exercises formerly confined to worksheets…or they become “wow” presentations of work students already did without the digital tools, with no real digital advantage. So the question becomes, what exactly constitutes digital equity? This is a question we have been exploring here in San Diego in an initiative we call Smart Tech Use for Equity where teachers are documenting a tech use in their classroom, focused on whether or not this practice actually makes a difference for students. Our work was featured in the latest issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine.

At a recent leadership meeting at the SDAWP (San Diego Area Writing Project) we opened up a discussion about how to best highlight the work SDAWP teachers are doing with digital learning in their classrooms. Our leadership group is a diverse cross-section of SDAWP teachers, representing levels from kindergarten to college and a variety of student demographics. The beauty of this group is that we bring diverse experiences and opinions to the group–and are willing to engage in conversations where we do not all agree. We discussed what we have done in the past…and what we might do in the future to share the work we know that SDAWP teachers are doing in their classrooms.

For some years now at the SDAWP we have had an SDAWP Twitter Fellow of the Week. Modeled after Sweden’s citizen Twitter campaign, SDAWP teachers share a glimpse of their teaching and their lives in San Diego. This work has allowed us to showcase the wonderful teaching and learning that takes place in our classrooms and has put us in touch with other teachers, educators, authors, and researchers from all over the country (and perhaps the world). But…it’s on Twitter and some folks are simply resistant to Twitter, so there are many educators this effort doesn’t reach.

The SDAWP also has a Facebook page. And because of the SDAWP Facebook page, many SDAWP teachers use their personal Facebook pages to connect to one another and share what is going on in their classrooms. But, our “official” SDAWP Facebook page doesn’t reflect this. Up to this point it has been used to share mostly external resources and pertinent information for those interested in the teaching of writing. Occasionally, we have opportunities to celebrate the teaching of our SDAWP fellows…but even though we have a team of administrators, teachers can only post prominently on the SDAWP page if they post as an administrator. So, why not open this opportunity up to more SDAWP teachers?

So, for Digital Learning Day 2016 we launch the SDAWP Facebook Fellow of the Week. Each week a different SDAWP teacher will post something going on in her/his classroom–celebrating the students they work with and their learning efforts. Some of the work will be specifically digital and some will not, but all will show ways SDAWP teachers strive to support the learners in their classrooms, honoring their lives and experiences in the process.

We hope to democratize our SDAWP Facebook page as a different teacher each week takes on the role of administrator and adds their own content to the page. Of course, careful attention will be paid to student privacy…a role that teachers have become increasingly aware of in this world of digital media, in our schools, and in our lives. We also hope that this effort will show the many ways digital equity is practiced in classrooms…and expose the inequities (many beyond the the control of classroom teachers) that still need our attention and effort.

How will you mark Digital Learning Day?

Architecture: The Structure of Learning

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We have a beautiful urban park here in San Diego. Open space, trees, a lily pond, fountains, trails, museums and restaurants…including some ornate and historic architecture that dates back to the Panama-California exhibition in 1915. In these storied surroundings, I’ve been spending time with a group of formal and informal educators investigating ways to improve school field trips through a project we call Intersections. (I’ve written before about it here and here.)

As I spent the day at the San Diego Natural History Museum today, observing a group of high school students on a field trip, I found myself thinking about architecture.

As the educator-researchers in our group discussed what we observed watching students during their field trip today, our conversation moved to the carefully planned structures that support students’ independence and dispositions toward learning. Field trips have traditionally depended on adult-centered structures that keep students “on-task,” ensuring that the trip has documented educational value in the form of completed packets of answered questions rather than trusting students to be interested in what they find in front of them.

Over lunch, our Intersections leadership team chatted with an external evaluator–a part of our larger National Science Foundation grant– about our observations and tentative conclusions. And we found ourselves thinking about and talking about all the learning that happens that we are not able to document. When we take students outside the classroom, what are we hoping for? What can they learn that the classroom environment doesn’t offer? And why then, do we keep trying to make field trips more like school?

As I look at this photo of a young woman using her cell phone to photograph an owl, I wonder how we encourage students to use tools and processes they use outside of school to support their own learning. How will this student use this photograph? What was she aiming for as she composed the image? How can students’ digital lives interact in positive ways with their school lives?

And as my colleague described her understanding of the development of social capacity, a concept important in her binational work, my understanding of the learning that happens on field trips continued to evolve. A field trip is not a classroom lesson, it is a social event, a shared learning experience outside the school environment. And while students certainly learn some content, they are also developing social capacity–as representatives of their school and class in a public arena. They are navigating unfamiliar spaces, coming in contact with people they don’t usually see, interacting with adults–docents, volunteers, vendors, scientists, researchers–and exploring materials not present in their classrooms and schools.

And in the best of situations they are figuring out how to interact with the space, people, and information in meaningful ways. I loved this informal game I observed today…a chaperone and his group spontaneously started counting the animals they spied in this coastal sage environment. Someone saw 9…and another saw 12, someone else saw 15. They started pointing them out to each other, looking closely, naming what they saw.

And another researcher watched a pair of students challenge each other on the native/nonnative quiz in the patio area. The goal was to win…and the game was calling on prior knowledge and combining it with what they were observing in the exhibit. And they were having fun…being social, laughing, enjoying themselves…and learning.

So what is the underlying architecture of a successful field trip…that structure that enables students to engage in learning on their own terms? That takes advantage of the place and the richness of expertise and artifacts that aren’t present in the classroom? And that honors the beauty and elegance of learning…not for a grade or a test, but because we are inspired and motivated to learn because we are learners–driven to make sense of our world, on our own terms.

“Do we get iterations?” : Creating a Culture of Innovation

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Over the last few years, my teaching partner Margit Boyesen and I have been working to help our young students develop persistence and grit…and to see themselves as producers in the learning process. We’ve been trying to explode the notion that learning is something that takes place only within the walls of the classroom and is assigned by teachers. We aim to have students learn more by doing than by listening, and as much as we can, we try to have students engage in meaningful projects that extend the learning environment beyond the school and whenever possible connect them to others who are interested in or engaged in similar endeavors.

These are lofty goals—and like other classroom teachers we are faced with state standards, accountability measures, and even the often slow to change expectations of parents, the community, and the educational system. But we also believe that students who are persistent problem solvers, designers, and communicators will have the skills they need to succeed in testing situations and in the world. But mostly, we believe learning should be fun…for our students and for ourselves.

And we’re lucky. Margit and I co-teach a multiage class of first, second, and third graders. Twice as many students, two interconnected classroom spaces, and students we get to teach for three years. Unlike many teachers, Margit and I don’t teach in isolation and our planning involves starting with an idea and building on each other’s thinking, adding to and challenging the whys and hows until we land on the lessons we will facilitate with our students. Two teachers in the classroom give us flexibility in supporting students…and in challenging them.

Thanks to our San Diego Area Writing Project colleague, Abby Robles, we added an advanced vocabulary routine to our instruction a few years ago. We include the target word without defining it (last week’s was precarious) in our morning message and ask students to think of possible synonyms based on the context. Students refine their guesses through the week, continuing to use new context clues from each day’s message until the definition is revealed on Thursday. Students help to generate a gesture to use each time they hear the word…a gesture that also helps with remembering the meaning. We select words to enhance the learning we have planned–to give authentic context for using the word and for our students to incorporate it into their personal vocabulary through experience.

Because we are interested in design and making, last year we introduced the word iteration to our class…and the practice of iteration as an intentional part of our teaching. (I wrote last year about a project that focused on iteration here.) And not only did our students learn the definition of the word iteration, they also began to recognize the value of iteration in their learning. It was obvious when we started programming using the app Hopscotch, that computer programmers value iteration. And that language of designing: imagining, trying out, testing, and improving as a continual loop began to permeate our classroom. Instead of talking about writing as drafting, revising, and final drafts…we started to talk about iterations, and gave students opportunities to plan, write, try out, improve. Another iteration became a much friendlier and positive way to talk about revision…and better yet, students started to ask for opportunities to iterate, in their writing and in all their projects.

“Do we get iterations?” became a common question as students began a new project or a new writing piece. And Margit and I found ourselves asking whether we had given students enough opportunity to iterate when we saw the elevated level of work and the increased creativity of products students produced when they could go beyond a single try.

As school began this year, we intentionally built opportunities for iteration into our instruction. And when we forgot, we often revised our lessons to allow for time to iterate. On our first day of school this year we planned a “mini make” out of a piece of aluminum foil and before the end of the lesson, we added time for a second iteration the following day. This practice of iteration has developed a culture in our classroom that supports collaboration, persistence and innovation. I was reminded of this today as students were working on an Alexander Calder-inspired mobile design challenge. Our forty-four students were at different stages of work on two projects: getting their individual blog titled and about me page posted and gathering materials to start on the mobile project. While it was “a lovely mess” in the words of my teaching partner, it was calm, productive, and collaborative. Margit and I each helped individual students…with their blogs, with cutting pipe cleaners and ribbon lengths, threading strings through “doo-dads,” and more. And what’s better, students were helping each other too. They were free to move around, collect materials as needed, be the second set of hands for tying a tricky piece of string or holding the growing mobile from the top as the creator worked on balance elements. And as time flew by, I could feel the flow of learning our students were engaged in.

When I think of cultivating a culture of innovation, I think of the power of iteration and the design process. In order to risk doing something new or different, its important to know that your first effort isn’t your only effort. When students ask about iterations, they are asking if they can try something new, if they can start over again, if they can learn from their attempts—even those that didn’t work the first time around. And they learn to persist and help each other out too, because that’s what we do in this culture of exploration and deep learning.

And even better, this attitude toward learning changes our teaching too. We also find ourselves in a culture of innovation, as teachers and co-learners. We can try that project that involves something new that we aren’t even sure exactly how it will work—especially with a classroom full of students—because we know that our first attempt isn’t the only attempt. Like our students, we get to iterate too, refining our teaching, our expectations, our processes as we innovate and work to provide meaningful learning experiences for this generation of learners.

Integrating Digital Learning

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Today was Digital Learning Day. And I’m all for focusing attention on digital learning to cast a spotlight and encourage more widespread participation. But I’m also thinking about the ways digital learning doesn’t fit in a day.

A glance at my Twitter feed today showed students blogging, making movies, writing arguments, voicing opinions, speaking out against bullying, creating digital stories, exploring stop motion animation, using QR codes, tweeting 6 word literacy memoirs, having silent discussions on digital discussion boards…and lots of collaboration, experimentation, and students and teachers learning together. I’m excited that so many of the examples of digital learning I saw were about students creating and producing rather than a passive use of the digital.

But I’m wishing for an “Integrating Digital Learning” day or week or month or year. I feel like we need a push for districts and schools and educators to think carefully about the ways digital learning can and should be integrated into the overall school curriculum, We could still have a “try something new” with Digital Learning Day to encourage experimentation and push educators and students to continue their learning about the possibilities of digital learning, but also focus attention on intentional integration of digital learning…which would also highlight the very real needs related to digital integration.

It’s hard to integrate digital learning when you don’t have access to digital devices, or when the internet is spotty…or sites you need access to are blocked. When the digital devices can’t be depended on, it’s hard to make plans to seamlessly integrate their use into the day to day plans for learning.

As we talked about Digital Learning Day with our students this morning, they reminded us of ways we use digital tools that have become so commonplace that we take them for granted. They pointed out that we (their teachers) use our computers (and printer) to print their math “sticker problems” and we depend on our Apple TV devices to allow us to share work wirelessly from our laptops…and our students to share their work from their iPads. We use the document camera to display song lyrics and share poetry and computers for showing digital video clips. My teaching partner and I also regularly use our phones to snap photos of students in action, documenting and highlighting student learning.

And then there are the iPads. Many of our students gather in the classroom before school to work on programming with Hopscotch, continue a blog post, or practice math on a district-wide digital math program. They love this informal “workshop” where they share discoveries and support each other in this unstructured learning environment.

We aim for our devices to become as invisible as pencils and paper. Today we needed to count the money we had raised for our micro loan. We suggested that students use the whiteboard function of Educreations to keep track of their calculations as they counted a portion of the cash. They document their process…and we don’t need paper. (Although we did have one group who found that they needed paper and pencil!)

We also embarked on our digital story project…an opportunity for students to tell the story of our micro loan project. Students examined an example of a digital story, noticed the parts, considered potential tools, and set to work. In teams they will develop a digital story, so today was all about the planning…figuring out what story they will need to tell in their finished product. They are already talking about the iterations they will need to go through…and can’t wait to draw pictures to digitize! This is not a one-day project. We hope they will be done by the end of next week!

The biggest difference for us on this Digital Learning Day was that we highlighted, both in class and publicly, the ways digital learning takes place in our class. Digital learning is becoming routine in our classroom, and we often don’t notice whether we are using digital tools or not. Some of our most successful digital projects often include more traditional classroom tools like pencils, paper, paint, and books as part of the digital process. And I think that is what we want with digital learning. Digital is another option. Sometimes it’s the best option, sometimes it’s not necessary…but it’s nice when we can choose to use what works best, not what is least expensive.

Although Digital Learning Day has come and gone, our students will continue their digital learning. What will learning look like in your classroom tomorrow? How do you integrate digital learning in your teaching and your students’ learning?

Digital Learning Day

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Tomorrow is Digital Learning Day. It’s meant as a way to draw attention to the need for digital learning in our schools, to showcase the potential of digital learning, and as a way to highlight what is happening in places where digital learning is taking place.

But I like some of the other conversations that take place because of the emphasis on digital learning. In some places we are talking about issues of access and equity. And we must go beyond buying the device when we think about access and equity. What are students doing with their digital devices? How is access to the digital transforming the learning process for students? What expectations come with the devices? What are student s expected to do outside of school? Even though many of these conversations take place on a small scale, they are important. And we need to have more of these conversations and keep equity (not just hardware) at the forefront of our thinking.

There are still many places where students don’t have regular access to digital tools. Or they are doing things on digital devices that simply replace what they were already doing without those tools, without changing the task in any significant way. Or teachers have a single computer or other device for use with a class full of students. Or teachers have a class full of devices without the background and professional learning to help them put them to effective use. Or they have devices and a lack of infrastructure…no way to work out the technical issues that inevitably plague working with the digital.

I’m lucky at my school. We are in our second year of 1:1 digital devices in my classroom and we have technical support available. I’ve been fortunate to work with many inspired and forward-thinking educators, especially my colleagues from Writing Project sites all over the country and throughout the state, who have modeled the potential of digital learning. My teaching partner is a willing risk-taker who will learn as she goes…and we support each other moving forward into the digital world that isn’t yet mapped out in the educational landscape.

That doesn’t mean that things are flawless in their operation or that moving toward digital doesn’t increase demands on my time as a teacher. It doesn’t make planning easy or learning effortless…my teaching partner and I spend precious time learning and relearning and helping our students navigate the inevitable technical difficulties that go with this digital territory.

And even though tomorrow is Digital Learning Day my students are doing digital learning every day. Our forty-plus six, seven, eight, and nine year olds have been working at getting their blogs designed and posts ready over the last few weeks. We discovered some new wrinkles in the way the Edublogs app works on our iPads this year…different than last year. You have the love the third grader who discovered the “back door” fix to uploading media to posts when the app says it won’t do it!

I’m more convinced than ever that “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” are simply the wrong terms to describe my students and their teachers (my teaching partner and me). But we are digital learners…together. And our students need and appreciate the guidance they get from us just as we appreciate their enthusiasm, effort, and ingenuity. As soon as I can get back to our class blog (maybe first thing in the morning), students’ first posts for this year will go public…I hope I can get to them all for Digital Learning Day.

And, we will launch into some digital stories tomorrow…in honor of the spirit of trying something new on Digital Learning Day.

What will you and your students be doing on Digital Learning Day? And how is it different from all the other days in your classroom?

Connected and Digital: A Reflection

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Today I had the opportunity to be a panelist on a webinar entitled, “Connected and Digital: Improving Learning for All Students,” put on by the Alliance for Excellent Education in conjunction with Digital Learning Day and their Digital Learning Transition MOOC.

I’ve been exploring connected learning for a while now, and love the way the learning principles:

interest driven
peer supported
academically oriented

and design principles:

production-centered
openly networked
shared purpose

work together to create a powerful dynamic for learning. In my view, connected learning is the embodiment of what it means to be a lifelong learner, learning because you want to, because you are interested, because you find it compelling and enjoyable. And that is what I want for myself and for my students. And just like my students, sometimes my interest in a topic or activity is piqued because someone drew my attention to something I didn’t even know that I wanted to learn about.

When I was invited to talk about connected learning and digital learning and the relationship between the two I had a little laugh at myself. A couple of years ago I remember asking over and over again, as part of a group exploring connected learning, if connected learning meant digital learning. And while I was given answers, it was this summer when I participated in the Connected Learning MOOC (clmooc) that I came to a firm understanding that all connected learning doesn’t have to be digital, but that digital tools allow for an amplification of learning that is often not possible without it. I know it has had a profound impact on my photography as I share my efforts and connect with others across the nation and all over the world who have similar interests.

What I loved most about my experience on the panel today was the opportunity to think deeply and carefully about why I believe connected and digital learning are important in schools and their relationship to issues of equity and access. Mary Ann Wolf, who moderated the webinar, took the time before the actual webinar to talk with each of the panelists separately about our experiences and views and then constructed a series of questions for us to think about a few days prior to today’s event. I like the question/answer format, that while structured, still allows for a flow of ideas and responses to one another’s ideas.

I also like that although I was one of the panelists and had already done a lot of thinking about this topic, I found the conversation interesting, illuminating, and stimulating. Comments made and information shared by Bud Hunt and Sara Hall have me thinking about aspects of connected and digital learning that I haven’t given my full attention just yet. I left the hour-long conversation with a full brain and many more ideas to think about, as well as resources to explore and new contacts to reach out to in this journey.

If you are interested, here is the archived version of the webinar:

What do you think about connected learning and digital learning? How are they enacted in your classroom? In your life?