Monday, April 11, 2011

Pinch Hitting

From the free dictionary

pinch-hit

intr.v. pinch-hit, pinch-hit·ting, pinch-hits

1. Baseball To bat in place of a player scheduled to bat, especially when a hit is badly needed.

2. Informal To substitute for another in a time of need.


It was pointed out to me the other day that we ICT Integrators are pinch hitters. Since this was a sports reference I looked at him blankly. But after some discussion I came to realise what he meant.

Before you take offence on our behalf, let me introduce you to a model I really like using in ICT Integration. It's called the SAMR model (link to a presentation by Puentedura outlining SAMR). SAMR was developed by Puentedura and stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. It can be used to assess your ICT integration to determine whether you're using technology to modify current styles of teaching or to transform. We have some brilliant transformative projects at our school and I feel privileged to be part of some of them.

Our job as ICT Integrators is to help teachers come up with projects that will use technology in the modification and redefinition levels of the SAMR model. They know their content matter and we know the technology and together we seek excellence in pedagogy. (this is s reference to the TPCK model also in the Puentedura presentation). It takes time, research and thought to come up with a good redefining project.

In a presentation the other day I was reminded of a fabulous excerpt from a speech by Ken Robinson about changing education paradigms…



I love this talk and I agree that we should shift education to be more tailored and purposeful and less standardized. I even trust that a good technology enabled project achieves some of what Ken Robinson is talking about (if only on a micro level).

However, I am not only an ICT integrator. I still teach classes on technology and as such I get a daily reminder of what classes are like around the clock. I introduce technology enabled projects for my own classes but at the same time I have to cover dry syllabus content and have slightly less enthusiastic students who need to be dragged through projects or less able students who need more structure than others and much more scaffolding.

This is the reason that my colleague said that ICT Integrators were pinch hitters. We don't often follow through to the exam, we don't have to mark the work of students who despite all our efforts didn't really "get it". ICT Integrators have magical powers. We do the work, we prepare the resources, we enter the classroom with enthusiasm and we signify to the students that this is not going to be a normal lesson. This means that we see the kids at their best; at their most engaged... and then we walk away.

What can we do about it? I think the only thing we can do is realise that we are pinch hitters. We should run the engaging projects, consult on the uses of technology in the classroom, encourage teachers to shift their teaching practices but realise that the other teachers have to be there all the time, even when they have to deliver the less interesting stuff. We need to not spend our time telling other teachers that if they only used more technology projects that their students would be engaged all of the time. I love my job but even I'm not engaged all the time; sometimes I'm reading what Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) just said on twitter.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Call me Hoges

I don't know how much I communicate with my students.


OK. That was a bit of a setup but the point is, I know how much I talk to them at work when they're sitting in front of me and I know how much we communicate via email and Moodle but what about outside that? I have a twitter account and a smallish blog, I am on the TED ED forum and follow a number of people's blogs and vlogs. I tweet, blog and comment online. How much of this is seen by my students? Maybe none and maybe all.


In the old days there were students and there were teachers. The teachers were up here and the

students were down there. Students called us Marm, Miss and Sir or at the very least Mr and Mrs. The teachers and the students didn't know no care what happened to the other after the bell.


I remember running into a teacher at the shops as a kid and it was a weird, awkward experience. She was still my teacher but they were in trackies and pushing a trolley. She still talked to me as if I was in her classroom and I still called her Mrs.


I know that one of my senior students is on the same TED ED forum as me and I'm not sure what handle she uses. If I get a comment from a student on twitter I don't always know to identify them and they call me @hogesonline. This sets up a weird situation. There is a democratising property to the internet that means that I am not the teacher and they are not the student; we are both subscribers.


Does this mean I should stop tweeting, blogging and commenting in forums. I don't think so. I think it means that I should be careful what I share and unlike Natalie Munro never forget that *anyone* could be reading .


It kind of lends a sense of superficiality to the exchanges with students at school where they still call me Mrs Hogan in the classroom, knowing that they will tweet me a questions to my handle that night. I don't believe that calling me Mrs__________ adds to the students' respect for me. I think as this kind of confusion of roles becomes more prevalent we might come to our senses and stop trying to impose a false autocracy in the classroom. Maybe that makes me "New Age" and I'm sure the eduverse has had this discussion before and often. All I know is I have tweeted to Mark Colvin (@Colvinus) - lead anchor of the AM program on ABC Radio - and got a reply and I couldn't do that in the old world.


Thanks to frankjuarez on Flickr for the use of the image.