Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Being a Learner

This morning Wendy Langley (Lee Stream Junior Teacher) and I patiently added her classes work to their private wiki.

Wendy and I worked on a class wiki. She will be training her students to put their own stories onto the wiki to share with each other and their families within their closed community. Wendy and Bilinda will be doing a whole school Action Research on typing. Some students will be using Qwerty to learn to type and some wont. They will then be able to measure the difference between the students ability to type their stories with and without training in typing. What effects does typing lessons have on children's story writing and word processing and is it powerful enough to warrant teaching this?

While we were waiting for the tenth story to upload, Wendy was discussing her past experiences learning various things on the computer and in another ICT cluster. She said that the best thing that computers had offered her was the chance to be a learner again and be reminded of what learning is like for some children.

I have to say that this rings true to me the key different in trying to present useful professional development to teachers using computers is the range of experience. In PD on reading for example you expect that most teachers have similar knowledge about teaching reading, you know that all teachers can actually read. With computers everyone comes to the course much like children in classrooms with a plethora of experiences and skills and you can't assume anything.

Wendy told me a few lovely stories about times she had been in situations with computers and at courses and realised that the feelings and reactions to these situations are exactly what her students feel at different times of the day. She said that this awareness has been the single greatest lesson computers have given her.

Good thing the Internet was a bit slow today or we wouldn't have had this conversation. Often the computers and Internet were a real pain for me in my class last year but actually some of the best things came from us having to get around these problems and many of those changes and solutions were not computer related things but they were the result of a challenge to do something differently.

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