Collaborative Creation Tools

As we continue to discuss the creation of a 21st classroom space at NVHS, I reflect on what I believe is an essential piece of technology in this space.

I believe it is essential to have a set of devices in a classroom that can foster student-centered creation in addition to a device that facilitates gathering student input and feedback.

Students are already creating content constantly: they create YouTube videos, and make photos they post to Flickr, they doodle and draw in class, they journal in 140 character Twitter/Facebook updates. In addition to interacting and engaging digitally with their peers, why not try to engage them with the content we love, while utilizing the skills and capacities they’ve already built? 

Students have a passion for sharing, sometimes, yes, even over-sharing. They want their peers to know what is happening in their life; they digitally reveal their thoughts, and subsequently comment or discuss about acquired information. They question, investigate and then construct a social knowledgebase about their world, and how they perceive themselves inside that world. 

Why can’t we embrace these skills students already come equipped to use? I am a proponent of an environment where peer critique, commenting, sharing, and refactoring information about our content can become a ubiquitous and essential part of the learning process.

So much of what we do as adults is not about the capacities we’ve built or the knowledge we have acquired, but the synthesis and subsequent communication of that knowledge. We produce stuff; we live in a world of stuff. The process of turning knowledge into stuff is so important (Look at this post). What are our students producing? Is it valuable to them? Is it valuable to us?

A student-response system provides students a voice in class; a way for them to influence the instructional direction they want or wish the teacher would take. It informs instruction in such a way that support and encouragement can be provided before, during and after a learning hiccup or success. It engages students because they can finally not be drowned out, and make the contributions we all know they want to make. I get it, it is necessary, it is helpful, and it will change teaching and learning, as we know it.

I am all about a device in every student’s hand, but the immediate formative feedback we desire can be gathered in both a very analog way, as well as, with technology at a relatively small cost with a full-text dedicated student response system. I am not ready for 1:1 student tablets/computers/etc. What is possible is not always what is attainable, 1:1 tablets will only end up as glorified student-response devices.

I don’t know maybe this is all too flower-ee. Am I just a not so young naïve educator for thinking this way?