Educational blogs to explore

I only just came across this post today, even though it was posted on 7 Feb. Nevertheless, it should prove a treasure trove to those who work in the formal education sector, particularly schools.

The blog is delightfully called Making Teachers Nerdy. The blogger identifies herself only as Mrs Smoke and says of herself "I'm a Technology Instructional Coach and Integrationist for the Andover Schools and an Intel US Senior Trainer. My favorite activities in Tech Integration are international telecollaborative and Travel Buddy projects."

In this post, she has listed a wide range of teacher blogs, touching on different roles, different age groups and different subject areas. Somehow, she seems to have missed Vicki Davis, but perhaps she was seeking to share a little link love with lesser known bloggers.

Teachers - do we trust them?

Jeff Utecht was relating recently how much respect teachers are accorded in Thailand, something which is reflected in the form of greeting they are accorded within the culture.

I have long been concerned that teachers are largely disempowered in the UK. During my short time (2 years) in a further education college, I experienced deep frustration at the peremptory way the staff were treated - often over-managed and usually accorded less respect than the students. I kicked powerlessly against the lack of freedom to be flexible based on the requirements of my students. There was this thing called Curriculum and, whether or not it met the needs of our students, it had to be adhered to, since it had been developed by a collection of minds patently superior to our own.

Some of the learning materials prepared for the purposes of affording teachers professional development seem to contain the implicit message that teachers need to have everything explained to them , or they will never figure it out.

When I have raised the question: is it entirely necessary to explain this point? Will teachers not be able to figure that out for themselves? The answer is often rather arch and skeptical.

Which makes me wonder: if we have so little faith in these people, why are we allowing them to teach our children?

I think we should perhaps cut them a little slack. Give them a little credit.

I related in a recent post how people often speak to their children in a way that implies that we expect them struggle with or fail at a given task. I expressed the view that a healthier approach was to start from an expectation of success and to offer guidance that was couched in terms that aimed at facilitating success rather than avoiding failure.

Perhaps it's time we adopted the same approach with the people responsible for educating the future doctors, lawyers, L&D consultants, Prime Ministers, entrepreneurs... and teachers.

Failing that, fewer and fewer people with creative minds and extraordinary abilities will be attracted to the field and we will have on our hands a downward spiral of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Thanks for nothing (rant warning)

I've been mulling over the reaction of some of my teacher acquaintances to the idea of using tech tools - particularly social media - as an integral part of their practice. Of course, if you're a teacher reading this, you probably already doing that. The people who react in the way I'm speaking of aren't reading this. In fact, many of them are still unsure what a blog is.

That's fine.

I'm not criticising ignorance. A person cannot control what they don't know if they don't know that they don't know it (if you follow me!). What bothers me more is stubbornness. The "Don't bother me with all that stuff" approach that says "this method of teaching was good enough when I was at school, and it's been good enough for hundreds of years." It's like sticking your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".

What I'm thinking about is the extent to which the way we are taught at school informs our views on learning for the rest of our lives. It's one thing if you leave school and become a learning geek like yours truly, whose entire life revolves around lifelong, lifewide learning. For someone who becomes a nurse/chef/engineer/whatever, to whom CPD learning is going to form an important part of the job, but one that they have to find the time to squeeze in, while getting on with their real job, their ideas on learning are probably held on some unconscious level, and will, on dissection, very likely look rather like their schooldays.

So, to all those teachers who are refusing to engage with ICT in teaching and learning, who maintain that the read/write web has nothing to do with them, who are not actually reading this blog... gee thanks!

Thanks for the guy who controls the budget and requisitions the learning solutions but wants the learning to look "like this" or "just so", with lots of back and next buttons and endless content dumps. Thanks for all those workers who suffer from total inertia when it comes to taking the wheel on their own learning journey. Thanks for all those people who feel that their professional development is someone else's responsibility.

I know I'm overstating the case - it's deliberate. I'm not having a pop at teachers per se. I know that they often get a pretty raw deal, and are often expected to shoulder responsibilities that should be handled at home. But I do feel that too many of us who have responsibility towards children and teenagers are in danger of abdicating our roles and neglecting our duty of care.

When we were expecting our first child, someone told us, "Parenting is hard work... if you do it properly, and the better you do it, the harder it is." Sometimes it's easier just to do a thing yourself than to keep on at your kids to do it, or to deal with the mess that results from their doing it. But what good is that to the child? So sometimes we have to put ourselves out. Sometimes we have to move out of our comfort zones. Sometimes we have to deal with mess. There's no margin for "can't be bothered" when it comes to equipping our kids for the future.

Okay - I'll get off my soapbox now!

Their space

It's about time someone produced something like this! To quote from the blurb "Their Space: Education for a digital generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media."