Making Connections

Well, the reality is unavoidable – there are five days remaining of my holidays. It’s time to stop avoiding the inevitable and start working my way through the box of paperwork I need to get done before next Monday. Usually we have a pupil free day on the first Monday of a term – but this term we don’t, so come Monday it’s action all stations and we’re hitting the ground running. Here’s hoping everyone’s batteries are recharged and that the flagging energy of the last few weeks of Term 3 will no longer be bothering us.

Here’s some of the things I MUST get done before term begins:

• Finish marking the Drama class’s ezine articles
• Set up a web based presentation of these articles to share within the walled garden
• Finish marking the Year 8 Art assignments (and no, I am not an Art teacher)
• Figure out exactly what I need to teach from the rather ambiquous and ill defined task sheet
• Find out what I’m teaching in the Middle School this term…this was left most vague at the end of last term
• Start work on a conference presentation (starting with finding the email outlining what I said I’d speak about…)
• Develop the email lists, email invitations and necessary handout/worksheets for students and staff about the Media Watching online competition I hope to hold with the Year 10 cohort this term
• Define and develop some sort of more formal approach to encouraging and supporting staff in using eLearning strategies – came up with a vague idea to acknowledge and promote some of the cool stuff happening in the school already, but am not sure how best to do this…anyone have any ideas?

And finally – the most important job for me to complete in the next five days:

• Completing the time/space warp drive so I can have all the time in the world to finish what needs to be done, when it needs doing!

Sometimes we don’t give our students enough credit.

I’ve been reading over the last assignment for Year 10 (14-15 yr olds) Drama. It was a responding task where they were asked to evaluate cyberdrama as a a “real” form of drama and present their (supported) opinion in an ezine article (which I’m going to spend a few days putting together into a webpage for us within the network.

This has been their second responding task this year and admittedly I was a little nervous – as I’ve spoken about before the cyberdrama unit has been a rather tumultous one with varying degrees of success (often on a lesson by lesson basis), plus they’d shown resistance to responding tasks earlier in the year (afterall all Drama is is standing on a stage reading lines, isn’t it….that opinion has now been changed – thank goodness).

I’ve been really impressed with the standard of these articles and some of the observations they’ve made. This one, I just had to share:

As years go by, and we head further into the 21st century, our need for knowledge is greater and the time we spend to seek answers has become less. With the creation of the World Wide Web, and numerous search engines, we are able to find a world of information just with the click of a button. There are endless possibilities to what the Internet can be used for… – Student K, 2008

I’ve been reading an interesting book the last few days. ReImagining Education by Jerry Goebel. It’s been a very interesting read – I’m only about a third of the way through it, but it’s already sparked off some interesting thought patterns for me. There is something in this book which resonates a sense of truth and really leaves me as an educator looking for the ways this book can affect me and help me to grow.

On the of the quotes which grabbed me on first reading:

If we adults, regardless of our roles, cannot make education relevant to the next generation then we cannot blame them for being disinterested. If I – as parent or teacher – cannot tell a child why it is important that they learn a subject I have no one to blame for their indifference but myself. (p6)

It’s so true. If I have to stand out the front of a class and answer the question, “But why do we have to study this?”, with something as inane as, “Because the curriculum dictates that this is essential to your development” (often summarised by teachers in its most condensed form – “Because”) – how can I honestly expect my students to CARE about the work we’re doing?

Mrrobbo recently spoke about the importance of engaging our students over on his blog after he stumbled on the video clip “Pay Attention“.

Again, there’s something about this clip which resonates. It speaks of the way our students have learnt to “play school” and really highlights the risks we’re taking with allowing our students to disengage from a school system not relevant to their 21st century world.

These two stimuli got me thinking – what’s stopping us from engaging our students? Why are we teaching them content they have no reason to CARE about? And more importantly, how can I inspire my students to CARE?

In thinking about those questions I’ve found myself going back to consider these questions:

• What do I CARE about?
• What inspires me to CARE?

Over the years I’ve been truly touched and inspired by a few things, simple and awesome things.
Some of the simplest things which inspire me – the way the light shifts and changes over the course of the day over our valley, the unconditional love my cat gives me when I’m working late on the computer, the way a ball of yarn can be twisted and knotted over two sticks to create a knit for someone I love, the forgiveness and support of my husband no matter what.

On the other hand some of my inspirations come from rather complex and challenging places.

• Cirque du Soleil (especially the first show I ever saw, Varekai), the way these artists defy the limits of our imaginations leaves me speechless. My favourite section, the flight of the twins:

• The generosity of people also inspires me – stories like “Pay it Forward” and the Free Hugs Campaign. These show us just what people are capable of when they connect and find inspiration within each other. They grow and become something so much larger and more significant than anyone ever expected them to be – they impact and influence so many more people than anyone ever imagined.

Our next unit in English is a Media Watching unit. Students will need to track a news story across the media and analyse the ways we are positioned towards a particular point of view.

While trawling the web today for interesting stimuli to use with my classes to help engage them I came across this great TED talk. This is one I’ll certainly be using to get the discussion flowing.

One of the biggest shifts for me since I started down the path of a hybrid eLearning approach in my classrooms was from a mindset of “must teach the content” to one of “let’s figure it out together.”

Presently, the sad truth is that our education system stiffles conversations – we are locked into blocks of time, age groups and topics, and the teachers are to be treated as the “source” of information. And those engrained features of our system make engaging students in real conversations about their learning a more challenging way for a teacher to function.

Students are entering our classrooms prepared to be talked at, they’ll take the notes they’re told to, they’ll learn the information they’re instructed to. They’re used to not having their opinions heard, to being told to put their hands down, to not speaking unless the teacher calls on them.

That’s really sad. And it certainly isn’t helping any of us.

So how do we change it?

As teachers we need to let go of the controls just a little (now, I realise that for many educators this is a terrifying thought, but it really will be ok), we need to acknowledge that our students have valuable contributions to make, we need to encourage them to share those with us, and we need support them in a shift from feeling their opinion isn’t as important as their teachers’ to feeling confident they have a right to be heard.

I taught short story unit earlier this year. Fairly easy genre and one the students have undoubtedly been exposed to many times over the years. I took two very different approaches with my two classes. One I taught the “traditional” way (ie, “A short story has these features…”), the other I didn’t “teach” short stories (we read ‘classic’ short stories, we shared our opinions, we wrote short stories and we shared those openly, we collaborated and we talked). The second group did a lot better – in a way not related to their abilities. They came out of the unit with more confidence, more ideas and more opinions…those outcomes weren’t on their criteria, but they’re certainly valuable, perhaps more so than how to write a short story (if we’re being really honest).

That unit showed me that talk has the power to engage, inspire and teach.

The last term has been pretty manic for me and out of laziness and exhaustion (and a degree of peer pressure from my colleagues) I’ve succumbed and slipped into old habits. This media unit I want to kick the cobwebs again, I want to reinspire conversations amongst me and my students. I want to be a learner with them. I want to share the ride.

Talk can see it happen.

What have you talked with your students about lately?

There is something exhilarting about giving your students the trust and belief to try something completely new. Especially when they’re so excited they have to be hunted out of the classroom after every lesson.

At the same time it’s incredibly terrifying….there’s so many things to be fearful of:

• What will I look like to my colleagues if this fails?
• What will the back up be if this doesn’t work?
• How will I explain this to my superiors?
• How will I support the students if they fail?

I look at that list of fears and concerns and not a single one of them justifies putting this project on hold.

So…what is the project that’s consuming me excitement at the moment?

Student managed cyberdramas.

Now the first question is going to be (as it always is eventually) – “What on earth in cyberdrama?”

Cyberdrama is the sharing of stories about people through various internet spaces. It’s a lot more like a jigsaw than a ‘traditional’ drama performance, there’s multiple sources of information to help the audience piece together the narrative. The fragmented nature of it lets the producers take advantage of all sorts of tools online – YouTube, Ning, MySpace/Facebook, Wikipedia/blogs/forums. It also lets the audience take on a different role from usual. In traditional drama the audience is quite passive – in cyberdrama the audience is lot more participatory – they rate videos, they share their theories through forums and wikis, they interact with the characters through MySpace.

I first got introduced to the concept of cyberdrama two years ago when I attended a conference workshop run by Sue Davis. For me, as an avid online gamer something about this concept just “clicked” and I knew straight away it was something I wanted to explore the potential of in my classroom. And over the past couple of years I’ve experimented to two class based cyberdramas.

The first one was run and managed by me within my small class of rural students – called “Searching for Mary”. The students developed roles which were somehow connected to a missing character, Mary, and tried to piece together what had happened to her. It was largely a text based cyberdrama (not ideal) and led into the students developing a non-realistic piece exploring the concept of identity as it was revealed that all the characters had different aspects of their personality that they shared with different people.

The second one has been “The Secret Society of Shapeshifters”, run and managed by Sue Davis. This one was far more ambitious with three schools participating, developing characters around the pre-text “The Seal Wife” and explore the story of the selkie kept from the sea by her human husband. They were to share their explorations through in-character (ic) video logs, wikis, blogs and forums. The project wasn’t as successful as I hhad hoped it would be, there’s many reasons behind that and the reflection I’ve gone through in order to come to terms with it has been very helpful to me as a teacher.

Anyway…because my students’ participation in the Society wasn’t as engaging for them as I’d hoped I took it to them and asked them for their thoughts. I didn’t get it – they were really enjoying the concept of cyberdrama (many are now avid watchers of LonelyGirl15 and have been eagerly awaiting the release of The Resistance), but they were just switching off when it came to the Society. Turns out the things they’ve been itching to do is try and create their own cyberdramas.

So, I took that information away with me and thought about it – why not? Could it work? How can I work it to make it managable? Was a good week of thinking it over and testing theories before I went back to them and laid it all out…

“Guys, this has NEVER been done this way before that I know of. I don’t even know how to write your assessment based on this, but I don’t want you to do a heap of work that doesn’t count for something. How can we make it work?”

I don’t think the class has looked back since…

So, in three weeks time we’re launching our very own cyberdramas – their designed to be short, a six week season only. And to be honest the ideas behind them are really sweet – I can’t wait to see how it all comes together. There will be:

• The Room – a psycological thrillar where the audience is asked to help solve the mystery of a kidnapped man locked in a dark room.
• Liars Anonymous – were everyone knows everyone’s a liar, but in that case, what’s the truth amongst the lies? Can the audience figure it out?
• Just Wait – Watch as an anonymous vlogger sets out to destroy an old friend, but can the audience figure out who she is before it’s to late?
• Secret Suffering – a tragic story of two sisters recently orphaned and their struggle to come to terms with the loss of their parents and the sacrifices that will need to be made to stay together.
• NewGirl – a school yard’s abuzz when a new girl starts at the school, shaking up friendships and the staus quo.
• State of Mind – actually…I need more details about this one

Unfortunately we haven’t been allowed to make them available to the general public. Our department has a very strict line when it comes to using the open web. So, for now we’re limited to the department’s online learning platform. Which is pretty good in a lot of ways, but it is going to limit us in a lot of ways too. And trust me, that’s led to me sending out some very detailed emails about it…

So, tomorrow the class and I are bomb diving into the deep end of this project – setting up their Cyberdrama spaces and developing their first week’s digital offers…let the fun begin!

Oh god…this is eitehr going to be awesome or devasting…

As a teacher sometimes it’s the small things that help us keep going.

For me, in amongst a week were I’m feeling incredibly under pressure, a pick me up came from a strange place.

I teach two extreme levels of English – the highest and the lowest within the same year level. I knew the highest class would have no issues with our study of “Romeo and Juliet”, but I was dreading getting 17 15 year old reluctant boys to read ANY of the play, let alone rewrite it and perform it.

It’s been hard work, and a lot of lessons I’ve walked out wanting a good stiff drink, but today I was more than pleasantly surprised when they did their first readings for the group. Their translations were good, they’d thought about how to represent their characters – there were even costumes and props.

It’s little moments like that when the continual fight seems worth it.