Letting Go

In the article "Great Teaching Means Letting Go" by Grant Wiggins, the author discusses that he observes too much "scaffolded and prompted" teaching.  I find myself guilty of this.  Trying not to jump in and help students when they are having trouble is difficult.  When I do step back and don't offer help or give them time to try to figure it out, I find students do not have the skills to problem solve on their own in a middle school classroom.  Our educational system has largely conditioned them to be rescued when they can't figure out something on their own.  Students need the opportunity to show what they know without teacher interference.  I think Wiggins recommendation to "get students to scrimmage more often, requiring more and more integration of their repertoire of skills and integration of concepts" is a big missing piece from education today.    


I think technology lays a great foundation for students to have that practice in a more game like situation.  Students can take control of their own learning in terms of how they learn it, what they learn, and how they show/apply what they've learned.  Lehman made the point in his webinar "Inquiry: The First Step in the Process of Learning" that students need to be taught metacognitive strategies that enable them to understand how they learn.  If we can teach students how they learn, we can put them in control of their own content.  This will enable them to learn as much as they want about a subject rather than me teaching them what I know about a subject.  This will lead to more inquisitive learners with a stronger sense of how to apply what they have learned and be able to use it in game situations. 

Reflective Searching

The "Google Generation" is growing.  What started with teens and younger demographics has spread like wildfire in recent years.  Google has become ubiquitous.  When I graduated high school, Google was only two years old.  We had the internet in my house and at several friends' houses, but we rarely used it.  Dial up internet speeds made it a chore, waiting 2 minutes on a site to open often times just to lose your connection and have to start over.  Twenty years later, my friends and I carry high speed, high powered computers in our pockets and Google has become a verb.  Whenever we have discussions and someone wonders something that we don't have the answer to, it's often met with the response "Google it".  This happens almost every time we're together.  It happens when I'm by myself too.  I start wondering about something, and pull my smartphone out of my pocket and look it up.

The research habits of the "Google Generation" found in the study "Information Behaviour of the Reseacher of the Future", have become my research habits.  When trying to find information on a topic, I typically start with a Google search then I skim through the headings that pop on the search.  If I am unable to find what I'm looking for, I may add another word to try to refine it.  This is a crude process without much forethought to how searches work.  Admittedly, I didn't know many strategies before beginning this course.  Then I skim through some articles trying to find the information I wanted.  In these ways I am very much like the "Google Generation".

A glaring difference I see between myself and the researchers mentioned in the study is the ability to determine if sources are credible and using fact checking techniques. I was fortunate to have parents that taught me to be skeptical of things people said or wrote.  The old saying "trust, but verify" was a common practice in my house.  I was also fortunate to have to incredible language arts teachers in high school that taught me how to research effectively and how to verify information from multiple sources.  These practices are useful today for the "Google Generation", with some slight modifications. We should still be teaching students effective researching strategies (e.g. how to discern the reliability of a source, how to find slant/bias, etc.)  at age/developmental appropriate times. 

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Students now have a unique challenge that has not been faced by previous generations of having too much information at their disposal.  The role of the educator has shifted from the "keeper of the knowledge" to teaching students how to navigate through information.  Without the appropriate skills, it becomes easy to lost in the ether that is the internet and have a lack of understanding of what is useful and what is not. 

The video "Infowhelm and Information Fluency" showed how much data is out there for individuals to sort through on a daily basis when they are online.  It is easy to become lost and not be able to find where you started in the first place.  Bryan Alexander gives useful tips, on his post "My Daily Info-Wrangling Routine" on how to organize the tools you use on the internet and for the appropriate purposes.  He also provides a useful framework on how to determine if what you are looking at is, in fact, useful.

It is vital that students are taught how to discern what is useful and how to find things that are useful when they begin taking control of their own learning on the internet.  Students are going to do their own learning, the question is will it be reliable or not.

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I would like to be able to share with students how to effectively find reliable sources of information on the internet in order to help them become in charge of their own learning.  I also would like to be able to find tools on the internet that students can use in order to share what they learned effectively using whichever medium they choose, in order to make the learning and product more personal to the student/